mother tongues
The bulk of feed was written in 2018, shortly after the death of my mother. The central portion, the hunger palace, existed before that, although the focus was more on the young girl body and disordered eating than it was the circumstances of the last year of my mother's life, but somehow, these two threads became one--the parts particularly about childhood and the foregrounding in her death. What had been a lyric essay project about my own historical body image issues & how they echoed my mother's became extremely poignant in those last months of her life. The fragments in the series were eventually integrated into a single piece that appeared in 2019 in The Journal, and now, in this book. Other similarly themed projects followed that same year. The Hansel and Gretal inspired plump. The changeling focused the summer house. swallow, which is another dip into adolescent body image. The final segment, the science of impossible objects, was another series that previously existed and some pieces already existed in draft form, but it took on a different lens in 2018.
What to do with all these mother and daughter, food and body related pieces, but make them into a full-length book. I began pulling it all together in 2019. Looking at it now especially, there are so many echoes of each segment in those that surround it. The apocalyptically shorn Barbie of the first section is echoed in the "Barbie cake...so big, it swallowed us all." The bee changeling of the summer house is revived in plump as the witch (this was unintentional, but worked out nicely.) The animals that take over the house in the hunger palace are the same animals that gather to watch the slaughter in plump. May perhaps be the same animals lifted from the museum in the science of imaginary objects. Or the "the outside animals that long to be inside animals" of the summer house. There is also violation of the body. The gauntlet of boys hands and predator/prey in swallow. My mother's creepy cousins in the hunger palace. The trapper's son in plump, "his fit around my throat."
It's particularly interesting to write a book about mother, about being a daughter, about (I guess metaphorically) being a mother, when mothering is, in this sense, an act of creation, of art making. So much of this entire book felt like a purging of sorts, which is also in many ways, it feels important to get it out in the world.
You can pick up a copy here .
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