Day of the Child: A Poem Contributor(s): Ross, Arra Lynn (Author) |
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ISBN: 1571315373 ISBN-13: 9781571315373 Publisher: Milkweed Editions OUR PRICE: $14.40 Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats Published: November 2021 |
Additional Information |
BISAC Categories: - Poetry | Subjects & Themes - Family - Poetry | Women Authors - Poetry | American - General |
Dewey: 811.6 |
LCCN: 2021011928 |
Physical Information: 0.3" H x 5.8" W x 8.3" (0.25 lbs) 96 pages |
Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
Publisher Description: From Arra Lynn Ross, a tender, generous, and generative extended poem centered on the experience of parenthood. "What is learned? I'll return for my son; / at school, at three thirty-eight, bells will ring & run / days over years." Using unpredictable syllabics, rhyme, and syntax, Day of the Child captures the sensation of altered time that accompanies a child's growth. Seasons come and go. A schoolboy becomes a dreaming infant becomes a five-year-old exploring metaphor for the first time becomes an ultrasound image, "a frieze on screen." A mother cycles through her own often dissonant identities: "soother, watcher, blame-taker." And both mother and child assume another, significant role: artistic collaborators. For Day of the Child is a poem co-created by child and mother, offering a space in which each's stories, thoughts, words--"unbound / by Time & time's delineations"--tangle together. In which apartness--"Oh indivisible divisible," the presence of another heart beating inside the mother's own body--is continually negotiated. And in which the mother considers her place as intermediary between the child and the world: her protection, her complicity, her joy. Its octave pairs ebb and flow, expand and contract, producing a portrait of raising another human as refracted as it is circular, just as a river "breaks into many suns, the sun." For, as the child asserts, "love is a circl e] round / as a Ball." Challenging the notion that parenthood is not itself a poetic endeavor, Day of the Child makes of childrearing "a refrain I reframed each day with new words." |