About Rachel J. Bennett
Rachel J. Bennett grew up on the Illinois-Iowa border and lives in New York City. Chapbooks include On Rand McNally’s World and Game, both from dancing girl press. Her poems have appeared in Gigantic Sequins, Ninth Letter, Poetry Daily, Rattle, and Smartish Pace, among other journals. She holds a B.A. in English from Grinnell College and has studied at Trinity College Dublin through the University of Iowa’s Irish Writing Program and in Ecuador.
Praise for Mothers & Other Fairytales
In gripping poems that explore the abject love and terror of being a mother and a daughter, Bennett evinces the instabilities and possibilities of our deepest human connections. Using language as a paradoxical site of presence and persistent absence, she deftly harnesses the mutual exclusions of our words and momentary worlds, where “…days / exist less when / you’re not speaking.” Mothers & Other Fairytales evokes the wolf at the door of our days, and speaks to the unspeakable in beautifully crafted lines whose haunting effects linger. —Kate Colby, author of Reverse Engineer
The mother and the mother’s absence are both characters in these adroit poems, chiseled lyrics that don’t reach for the mythic so much as succumb to it: “The girl with a mother throws the mother / to the ground as she runs, and / the mother becomes a mirror, the mother becomes / a forest.” Emerging from this penumbral space, the mother’s experiences of pregnancy, birth, and early parenting become lexical sieves, grammatical experiences, and the poems arrive at stunning insights into the condition of maternal embodiment, which is to say, the human condition: “A body is not a castle—it’s a snowball, / starting from very little. It stretches like a piece // of music around its listeners, forgets / itself, carouses within a history of // devastation.” Mothers & Other Fairytales brings motif and blood into one silhouette, a figure illuminated and animated by the language of its own making. —B.K. Fischer, author of Ceive
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