Mother Tongue

I like to think of poetry chapbooks as bouquets. For those who don't know, they are small — comprised of poems intentionally and carefully arranged. They are, for me, meant to be gifts as well as works of art. They are tightly woven, have typically small press runs, and my favorites are those which are handmade and/or hand-stitched. For those reasons, I was pleased to have my chapbook, Mother Tongue, published with Dancing Girl Press & Studio, a Chicago-based small press and print studio that has published over 300 titles by emerging women writers in handmade editions. It was a wonderful experience to work with an editor, Kristy Bowen, on putting the finishing touches on a vision I had for how I wanted these poems to be received.

The poems in this chapbook were all written before M, though I compiled, ordered, and edited the manuscript during my last trimester; in that way, she was there in those final stages. Largely, I remember laying out the pages and having to take breaks to put my legs up a wall or squat. But my due date, or really two weeks before, was the deadline I gave myself to put a manuscript together, something I'd never done before, and from there to send it out. I really did like the custom-made process to DGP press, its mission, and the other poets in the catalog.

Motherhood, though present, in the chapbook, isn't the dominant theme. It is more concerned with writing about Cuban immigration and my own sense of bi-racial identity as it has played out for me – as it crosses in and out of the borders of language, class, gender, race, and so forth. It is about the unique circumstances and contradictions wherein one finds oneself when pressured overtly and subtly into choosing one identity or the other. It is also, I hope, a homage to my mother's immigrant roots, her family story and my own. I did a full interview about the chapbook on The Chapbook Interview with thoughtful questions from Laura Madeline Wiseman.

I was really pleased with how the chapbook, as now a material book, turned out. I envisioned two poems in particular ("Blur (n.)" and "Blur (v.)") could be laid onto each other by printing one of them on vellum so that they would be at once a puzzle and a palimpsest, a recollection of the past and a projection into the future. I took some photos below to show.

If you are so inclined to want to order the book, you can simply write me a message and I'll send you one in the mail or you can order one from the Dancing Girl Press website: https://dulcetshop.myshopify.com/products/mother-tongue-sara-burnett


Lastly, in the interest of transparency in this blog about motherhood, writing, and art, below are photos of my process as well as my formerly pregnant self when I was putting it together. Some parents-to-be spend their time preparing a nursery - writers do that too, and this as well.