Mother Fur is a triptych look at new parenthood. Confessional poetry, fictional characters, and lyric essay interweave in cosmic force, as the author learns what it means to be a mother. The first part offers tender poetry about an infant and his birth. The second part explores primal creation through the eyes of Grendel’s Mother-who is deemed monster along with her offspring. The third part, an essay, forms a kind of synthesis: learning gentleness despite one’s family of origin.
The relationship between the three parts is poetic, not purely logical; it is up to the reader to connect what resonates in the spaces between confession, fiction, prose, and poetry. Mother Fur is not just for parents, however. It is a book for those who wish to forge their own identity through liminal experiences.
“It is not enough to bear,” writes Nadia Arioli; “one must erase all evidence of having done so.” This book sheds light on what it costs to bring another person into being,and stands as a bold refusal to hide that cost. In deeply embodied writing, Arioli pits archetype against reality in order to illuminate the human and profoundly animal experience of motherhood. Arioli’s gift for word-on-word poetic friction builds a devastating heat that makes honesty inescapable. This writing demands we understand the exhaustion, tenderness, pain, and absurdity of birth and motherhood and the fact that each of us owes our existence to “life pulled from a wound.”
Lisa Huffaker, teaching artist in residence for the Writer’s Garret
Nadia Arioli’s Mother Fur is that rare commonality that is both an interrogation of crowded stillness and a confessional written in the ghost dark of movingly lonely observation. Spiritually tactile and physically worshipful of the exhaustion that invents fatigue, it is a verse that musics itself beyond the chorus of admittance and into the recalled invitation of a witness that acts as the inner life of the photo. A work of protection and parenthetical braveries, it is full of a draining care specific enough to parent emptiness in all its bullied and stray forms.
Barton Smock, author of Wasp, Gasp
Nadia Arioli’s Mother Fur is a wonder that begins and ends with tenderness-a new mother teaching her “son / to use / dandelions / instead of / flame,” a new mother coaxing a banished family cat into her lap to be loved. But Mother Fur is no Mary Cassatt painting of early motherhood, all “pink and green… a sacred circus.” It is instead a hardscrabble landscape-one of loss, the complexities of familial bonds, and the search for identity, all centered in the unlikely mythic figure of Grendel’s mother. Grendel’s mother, who lives and breathes and struggles in a sequence of fifteen astonishing poems that comprise Mother Fur’s fearless animal middle. Grendel’s mother considers, yes, many things from her inimitable vantage point, even the need
for “convalescing”-which she boards a Greyhound bus to accomplish. What a ride.
Robin Turner, author of bindweed & crow poison
To enter the gorgeous music of Mother Fur is to become one with lyrics that sing of a new birth, these songs resonating with the beautiful mystery of the rebirthing moments within our lives. A triumph of compassion and lyricism, Mother Fur unveils the growing truths that await us all.
Dwaine Rieves, author of When the Eye Forms and Shirtless Men Drink Free
Nadia Arioli
is the editor in chief of Thimble Literary Magazine. Arioli’s poetry has been nominated for Best of the Net three times and for the Pushcart and can be found in Rust + Moth, McNeese Review, Penn Review, Mom Egg, and elsewhere. Essays have been nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart and can be found in Hunger Mountain, Heavy Feather Review, SOFTBLOW, and elsewhere. Collections are with Kelsay Books, Spartan, Luchador, Dancing Girl, and Cringe-Worthy.