This Country of Mothers Poems by Julianna Baggott   March 2001 ISBN 0-8093-2381-8 | $14.95 paper 88 pages | 6 x 9 Poetry   Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Jon Tribble, editor   Visit the author's site.   “Against a backdrop of family stories, Julianna Baggott draws themes as sharp as razors. She is an accomplished poet of the eye and ear, of the definitive feminine experience, and her poems of private life are expansive enough to suggest a vision of a political and historical era. If Baggott's large subject is memory and, especially, its defaults, the clarity that so many of her characters seek to deny is her great virtue. Poems like “The Annunciation: Our Mothers at Church” and “The Dead Must Disappear or Join a Story” might be admired exclusively for their technical skills, but they are also marvelously accessible. This Country of Mothers announces a poet of substantial powers.”—Rodney Jones, author of Elegy for the Southern Drawl   “In Julianna Baggott's This Country of Mothers, a distant and uncaring god is always near.  Baggott's world is haunted by blood, miscarriage, suicide, and family love—and set against the world of the Bible. In one striking poem the speaker embarrasses and tires Jesus himself by telling him how ‘a woman resigns herself to joy’ because she knows her body will be ‘ripped open’ in childbirth. And when Jesus, exhausted by her rant (‘I've gone too far’), lies down on the sofa, she covers him with a white sheet and takes care of him.  In these large, passionate, compelling poems, the speaker's family and the holy family merge in love and suffering—wholly family, wholly loved, wholly suffered for.”—Andrew Hudgins, author of Babylon in a Jar: New Poems   “Julianna Baggott has a fierce imagination which probes the ordinary details of a woman's life and lights up both the sacred and profane.  In a poem called ‘Blurbs,’ she half facetiously hopes for the words ‘sexy,’ ‘elegance,’ and ‘bite’ to be applied to her work.  Happily, in this book, she earns all three.”—Linda Pastan, author of Carnival Evening: New and Selected Poems 1968-1998   A mosaic of memories, the poems of This Country of Mothers recollect Julianna Baggott’s experiences as both mother and daughter. With wit, compassion, aggression, and anxiety, Baggott examines her maternal history. She recalls moments of creation and destruction in her life, times of elation and of desperation that mold her as both a woman and a poet. This affecting study of motherhood is framed in issues of Catholicism and of poetry itself, challenging and espousing the roles of both. Throughout her poems, Baggott’s personal experiences embrace universal themes to birth poems in a language and style that is both powerfully feminine and accessibly human.   Julianna Baggott received her M.F.A. from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She has held fellowships and scholarships from the Delaware Division of Arts, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Ragdale Foundation, and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Her poems have been published in Poetry, The Southern Review, and Best American Poetry 2000. She is the author of Girl Talk, a novel, which has been translated into five languages. She lives in Delaware with her husband and three children. Visit the author's site.   Preschool   The teacher matches child to mother--Alexis to the tanned blonde in argyle socks and khaki shorts; Harley, in his blue paper hat, to the woman with fish earrings. It's the way I'd imagined birth, the presentation of a chatty child with teeth and hair,   how Little Red Riding Hood, holding granny's hand, stepped from the wolf 's gut in her shiny black shoes, the two of them polished by the gullet, surprised, new, whole. I am not the wolf but the woodcutter, leaning proudly on his ax.   The teacher glances at me, then back into the classroom. She hands me a little sweater with dirty cuffs and the child that goes with it. Of course, I'd recognize her anywhere,   sticky cheeks, rumpled hair, eyes too big for the head, and the newspaper hat overflowing with glitter and gold wire. I kneel, whisper, "Mama, how I've missed you. Will you hold my hand?" It fits, a tiny white vase in my palm.       What We Didn't Talk about at Fifteen for Elisbeth   We never spoke of the drowned girl, found naked and raped. Flashlights stuttered through trees until one lit her body tangled in lake grass and everything continued on: we filed past the empty desk, crowded the row of bathroom mirrors, but I want to know, years later, if we all secretly imagined the stirred silt rising around her like our mothers’ powder, sunstruck, and the shy girl's mouth and eyes open wide as if she'd died singing our favorite radio song, sugar, sugar, oh. Didn't each of our mothers warn it could have been us? And the man, still alive and stalking, didn't we all harbor him; don't we still wake up some nights running beside the tall lake grass? Didn't her death wean us from childhood the way some factory women claimed to wean their babies, nipples coated in hot sauce, a live coal in the mouth? And didn't we all fall in love with her; spend these years hoping to find her one day, sitting quietly at a bank teller's desk, still young, how we would hold her, rock her singing sweetly.