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.
“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.”
““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.””