Fathom Magazine Interview

Aarik Danielson at Fathom magazine did a deep dive into my poem “Purity Culture,” from Madonna, Complex in this interview. It was an honor to interact with such a thoughtful and perceptive reader! Find the full interview at Fathom Magazine.

Early in her new collection Madonna, Complex, Fueston pens the poem “Purity Culture.” It’s an adult’s clear-eyed rejection of the rhetoric that ruined young adults who were trying to keep themselves from ruin. Then throughout her book Fueston continues to reckon with the flesh she was taught to fear, a God who shows up in paradoxes, and the ineffable beauty of a world that fills us up and lets us down. The book’s final section is a consuming fire, as Fueston exposes the lie that we can separate our political and devotional selves. She writes of a women’s march like a catechism, rehearses the liturgy of protest and makes an icon of Christine Blasey Ford—even as she acknowledges that “no ordinary woman ever tried to be a saint.”

“Because love is not a fullness, it’s an / ache. Because one God I’ve known has loved me most / when He took everything away,” she writes in “To a Friend, Lonely in the Fall.” 

This line signifies the spirit of Fueston’s work, which rejects needlessly confining categories to reach a God who wants to be found. 

Madonna, Complex reviewed in "Mothers Always Write"

I was grateful for Amy Nemecek’s review of Madonna, Complex that appeared at Mothers Always Write in July.

Motherhood can be more complex than we expect. In the empty ache of longing to be mothers, we sometimes forget we want to be anything else. In the frenetic fulfilled desires of motherhood, we often set aside dreams of being anything else. And when we work or serve or play apart from our role as mothers, we feel guilt for wanting to pursue anything else. 

In her first full-length collection, Madonna, Complex, Jen Stewart Fueston inhabits the spaces where these complexities collide. Some of these poems first appeared in her chapbook titled Latch, which I also highly recommend. All of them will resonate in the hearts of those who are mothers or who long to be mothers.

Review of "Latch" in Amethyst Review

Check out the beautiful and attentive review of “Latch,” Dr. Sarah Law wrote for the online journal, Amethyst Review:

This is a powerful short collection with an overarching theme of birth and motherhood; a perennial experience presented afresh with rich lyricism. Motherhood in these poems is something longed for and experienced on a physical, spiritual, and emotional level, from the contingencies and difficulties of conception, through the self-emptying of birth, and the loosening of the self’s boundaries as a baby is breastfed (both the title term ‘latch’ and ‘milk’ are explored as potent words that function as both noun and verb). The poems are also alive to the metaphorical resonances of language; they are lucidly and sometimes playfully written, and because of this, touch on many other aspects of human experience too.

"Latch" reviews, and a conversation

I’ve been so pleased by the response to my chapbook “Latch,” which was recently reviewed by Tasslyn Magnusson at Mom Egg Review. Her review did a wonderful job capturing the essence of the book. You can check out the full thing at Mom Egg’s site!

Fueston’s verse navigates masterfully from the small details of conception and early motherhood to the larger observations about life. I loved one such contrast in What the Mother Says on Birthdays. “Trans-vaginal made me think of trans-Siberian, some / wilderness of train tracks, wind whipping over barren / wastes. Or of trans-Atlantic, the swollen silver bellies / of the planes glinting off the surface of the sea.” To contrast the intimate and invasive nature of trans-vaginal ultrasounds with these vast physical environments, returns power and connection of the process of being a mother to a larger non-human enterprise. I’d argue that the imagery returns the dignity and sense of awesome to that mothering moment – or at least it did for me, thinking of my own trans-vaginal ultrasounds. I see them in a new and unexpected light.

I was also honored to have a chance to speak with two students at Lee University who help curate the Speaking of Marvels blog. They asked some wonderfully insightful and detailed questions about the book, and it was great to have a chance to delve into the writing process with such attentive questioners. My interview with them is here.

VR and MT: You note that one of the poems in Latch, “To the Women Marching, from a Mother at Home,” was very timely, that you didn’t know if you had “ever felt the urgency of a poem at that level before.” How did you channel that sense of urgency into your work, and where else does it appear in Latch?

I think poets have a unique and much-needed ability to speak about current events in language that goes beyond the factual, but which engages imaginatively and empathetically with those around us. Writing “Pablo C. Tiersten,” enabled me to enter, briefly, into imagining another person’s final moments and what grief and terror must have driven him to, an experience I found incredibly moving. Writing that poem became a sacred act of honoring someone I might never otherwise cross paths with. It can be overwhelming to try to process all the distressing news of each day, and the temptation to simply let it wash over me without feeling or grieving it is great. Writing these kinds of poems is a way in which I let my heart participate in the world’s sorrows, and that keeps me awake to life rather than numb to it.

VR and MT: In the beginning of your chapbook, you include a page with all the different definitions of the word “latch.” How did you come up with the idea to do this, and which definition do you believe represents the chapbook as a whole the most?

The most obvious meaning of the word Latch for this book is the meaning used in breastfeeding when the infant has successfully latched on to the mother. That very intimate and vital connection was a fruitful image to contemplate as a central metaphor for the book. There are a lot of other resonances, however, when you think about a latch as something that opens or closes or fastens. Having a child closes certain doors, and opens new ones. I also really liked the specific linguistic use of the term “latching” as a communicative act in which one speaker begins an utterance and another speaker continues it. That struck me as a lovely parenting metaphor as well. I think book or poem titles provide an opportunity to contemplate a word in all its possible dimensions, its richness, and how the same word can hold conflicting emotions in tension. Something that is “latched on” is secure, but it is also something that can’t be escaped.

Now available from River Glass Books: “Latch”

I’m so excited to be able to share my new chapbook, “Latch,” just released by River Glass Books. This book has been two years in the making, and I’m so pleased with how it has turned out! To order your copy, check out River Glass Books site, OR if you’d like a signed copy, you can contact me directly via email or any of my social media links.

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“From the heavy shadows that infertility invokes, to the fierce, fearful latch of child to mother to world, Jennifer Stewart Fueston’s collection attends with fresh, lyric precision to the bodies and minds of mothers across time. These nuanced poems search motherhood’s sacred spaces—exploring what historic paintings of Mother Mary don’t show, what might be filling a nest that lies empty, and what it means to rock an infant at home on a day of public protest. Their charge towards empathy and justice is as keen as their craft. “Night is a mouth,” Fueston writes in one poem, and, in another, “milk can be a verb.” Latch delivers a mother’s powerful vision, the mouth and milk of it, with music, nerve, and grace.”
— Sally Rosen Kindred, author of "Says the Forest to the Girl"
““I love this chapbook so sincerely that my usual ease with talking about poetry leaves me when I try to describe the vivid, expansive nature of these poems. To borrow from the speaker in ‘Clipping,’ ‘My own words have / forsaken me. I nest / in others for awhile…’ In just twenty-four poems, Jen Stewart Fueston has somehow managed to sing of the uncertainty and the persistence, the history and the immediacy, the political and the intimate aspects of mothering. An early poem invites us to laugh with the Virgin Mary in a mall while a later poem invites us to mourn with Mother Mary over a man killed in 2015 as if he is her only son. When the speaker in these poems shares some of the most private moments of praying to conceive and nursing in the night, the language is surprising, taking us far from stereotypes of motherhood and into something true. I know that I will return to nest in the words of these poems for years to come.””
— Katie Manning, author of "Tasty Other," and "The Gospel of the Bleeding Woman"

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Honored to have a poem in this new anthology, available Sept. 4!

This anthology, born in response to the 2016 Presidential election, combines the voices of poets from across America—from red states and blue states, high schools and nursing homes, big cities and small towns—with the voices of poets from other countries and other times. From Virgil and Dante to Claudia Rankine and Mai Der Vang, from Milton to Merwin, from Po-Chü-i to Robin Coste Lewis, these voices—now raucous, now muted, now lyric, now plain—join together here in dissent and in praise, in grief and alarm, in vision and hope. The 126 poems in this book call out to America in resistance to threats to our democracy and in the resilient belief that this fragile, imperfect form of government can and must be preserved. “These poets have an urgent message to share with you,” writes Camille T. Dungy in the foreword. “This message is brand new, and it is also eternal. Read carefully. What you learn here might just save your life.”

Click to order via Amazon