Tyger-Tyger

This poetry chapbook, Tyger-Tyger, meditates on the collision of trauma and motherhood. Memory appears as a central character as it is refracted and smudged over the nonlinear narrative. Each poem insists that maternal love is both soft and fierce, as the mother tiger paws through the human house, ready to protect her cub and lie down beside her. While the work contains an abundance of fruit and nets of sunlight, it also reveals dark undercurrents of personal and societal violence. Here, among rivers and orchards: lemons, tangerines, and apples abound, and yet an insatiable hunger to be transformed by something beyond the earth and its fruit repeats itself. The author lays out the themes of motherhood and "recovery" - not in the sense of being restored to a lost wholeness but rather to a new appreciation of the beauty that was always there. At its core, Tyger-Tyger is a love note from mother to daughter, and, to the mother's surprise, the child responds ...