This poetry collection seeks to recover the lived experiences of women who have often appeared only fleetingly in official histories, and also pushes towards a more expansive understanding of ‘motherhood’, inclusive of broader urgent issues about gender and our collective responsibilities for lives, environments and natural worlds.

“She has birthed a creature of the deep. Curled grace unfurling, starfish hands circling. The conductor of waves, doctors, tests. She harvests red algae, kneads little loaves of laver bread.”

Advance Praise;

“In Rachel Bower’s powerful new collection, you will find mothers displaced, mothers deceived, mothers labouring to stay sane and alive. But woven amongst any vulnerability is a fierce celebration of the mother-body, opened up to prove the unique and complex
stories each one holds. I am grateful to Bower for finding these women – historical, biblical, autobiographical – and offering me such inventive, arresting poems, brim-full with blistering truths.”

– Rebecca Goss, Poet