Category: Motherhood

Review: Milk Teeth

6/1/2022

Cycles of Fear and the End of the World
Review: Milk Teeth

Daria Husni

Helene Bukowski
Novel
Unnamed Press, pp. 223
Cost: $26.00 (hardcover)

Against the backdrop of a slowly dying world, Helene Bukowski writes a beautiful and brutal story about living with trauma, the strain of motherhood, and the danger of fearing the unknown.

In the opening lines of Milk Teeth, Helene Bukowski sets the tone for the story to come: “The fog has swallowed up the sea. It stands like a wall, there, where the beach begins. I can’t get used to the sight of the water. I’m always looking for a bank on the opposite side that could reassure me, but there’s nothing but sea and sky. These days, even this line is blurred.” Beautiful, brutal, and eerily accessible, the story of Milk Teeth is one that peels back the layers we build around fear; it lays them bare along tainted waters and dares its readers to move through the fear and into the beyond.

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Review: Grimoire

6/1/2021

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Bleeding, Black Mothers, and Systemic Racism
Review: Grimoire

Julianna Holshue

Cherene Sherrard
Poetry
Autumn House Press, pp.68
Cost: $16.95

On her dedication page, Cherene Sherrard indicates her poetry collection, Grimoire, is “[f]or the mothers.” I am left with the following question: what makes a mother a “mother?” Is it the nine months of carrying a child in the womb, giving birth, and then raising said child? Or is it simply the act of loving a child, despite not ever meeting them due to gestation or birth complications?

I ask this question because many of the speakers in Grimoire are childless, either due to miscarriages, complications, or stillbirths. Are they included in Sherrard’s dedication to “mothers”? Can they even be considered mothers without living children? These mothers in Grimoire, who have lost their babies, are Black mothers in America, and for many, they have lost their babies due to factors out of their control such as miscarriages and institutionalized racism.

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Review: Milk Teeth

Review: Grimoire

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