Carrie Nassif’s visionary and cutting-edge collection explores the heat and blood, magic, grief and ecstasy of motherhood, particularly how this rite of passage and change of status transforms who we are from the inside out. As she writes in one poem, “a child emerges from the vapor first/ and everything else collapses to become its mother.” Her tilting imagery and daring rhymes take us into a wider view of how language and life can unfold even after, as she writes, “they tell me perspective is a vanishing line.” This is a powerful and original journey into what’s often beyond or outside our tired and true words.
–Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, Kansas Poet Laureate Emeritus
Lithopaedion is a deeply moving and powerful collection of poems borne in the fecund world where mothers are bearing daughters, even as they look back at their own mothers; where the female body, strong and natural is emerging from an uncultivated world, a world fertile, yet susceptible to weakness, to death. Lineage is at the heart of these poems. They are full with birth, afterbirth, intergenerational trauma, but motherhood is their force. This is a collection to read again and again.
–Rachel Neve-Midbar, author of Salaam of Birds
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