ABOUT THIS BOOK

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.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

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.

REVIEWS

“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

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“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

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“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

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Contents

Acknowledgments

One

How It Begins

Kitchens: 1959

Conception

The Cold War: My Parents as Newlyweds

My Mother Gives Birth

Two

Correcting Memory

The Knocking Tree

Recalling the Leg

Nights in Tijuana

Learning to Say No at the Immaculate Conception High School

First Time

What We Didn't Talk about at Fifteen

My Mother Refuses to Wear Glasses

My Grandfather Returns after Many Years

How I Fear God

Coming Home at Seventeen

My Mother’s National Geographics

The Annunciation: Our Mothers at Church

Three

After Giving Birth, I Recall the Madonna and Child

First Pregnancy

Satisfying the God of Statistics

Preschool

Seventy Degrees in December

Checkup after the Operation to Evacuate the Dead Fetus

You Found Me in the Dry Tub, Fevered, Whispering of God

After the Miscarriage

Mother as Judas

The Pill

Language Lab, Paris, 1989

After Eleven Days of Rain

The Cow Remembers Urus

Pharaoh’s Dream

My Daughter’s Sight

My Daughter, like Eve, Realizes Nakedness

Cesarean

Four

What the Poets Could Have Been

Blurbs

Dear Mr.Houdini,

The Assumption: Mary’s Heart in the Guinness Book of World Records

What I Told the Jehovah’s Witness

Discussing Sorrow with Jesus

My Cousin Attempts Suicide in Gander Hill Prison

Jesus in the Mail

On My Husband's Thirty-Third Birthday

Living Where They Raised Me

The Beginning

The Dead Must Disappear or Join a Story

Five

My Mother among Bears

My Mother Prays to Dream of Her Dead Father

My Mother in the Garden

Mummification

The Extra Rib

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