Still Life with a Mother Torn in Half

Abstract

Still Life with a Mother Torn in Half is a collection of poems about the intrinsic connections between death and our familial lives. I seek to ask questions about the finality and multiplicity of death, how we carry corpses and how we move on. Each poem is focused on some combination or iteration of mother/father/space. Since many of the pieces are memories, I wanted to give careful consideration to the images and visuals. This exercise of considering space allowed me to explore otherwise latent memories and recontextualize familiar ones. The underlying theme of Still Life is an exploration of death in all of its shapes. When I began centering my work on the idea of a death as multiple and reoccurring, there was a clear line connecting it to parenthood and my independent experiences as a mother with depression. I felt pushed to dig into the way we experience deaths in the family unit and trace the fault lines of those experiences. I want these poems to memorialize past lives and honor the ways they are still present.