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.