Mother Country

"Mother Country is in large part about the body. The body, like a country, holds so much, and all at once. So much doubt, joy, pleasure, power, uncertainty, pain, family, beloveds, the individual, the collective. There is life; there is loss; there is miracle. The collective has power to sustain the individual. The individual also harness their own power."
—The Rumpus

“Mother Country is a breathtaking and mythical account of the complex, everyday, and porous realms of death and birth. With lyrical, imagistic intelligence and unwavering precision, Bell writes the deaths of her unborn children, her grandmother, versions of herself and of her mother. The result is a steadfast and achingly clear record of a woman's mother-route, which, among other things, traces the shape of her own mother's life and illness. She writes: ‘Through the dark I feel my mother's wild eye.’ And: ‘My mother was a dead doll I held her / hand in the land of the dead / and did not turn away...’ Gravid with loss, Bell's is a haunting, vital, songful work, and it does not turn away.”
—Aracelis Girmay, author of Kingdom Animalia, finalist for the National Book Critic’s Circle Award

“Mother Country provides us passage through the many portals of what it means to be, alternately, dependent upon or responsible for another’s nurture. And like the experience itself, these poems are both comforting and terrifying. Elana Bell has put to language an experience so intrinsic to its moments, I did not know how it might be brought to life in a poem. One leaves these poems changed, even healed, by their beauty and deep humanity. This book is not just for mothers. It’s for everyone.
—Cate Marvin, author of Oracle and co-founder VIDA: Women in Literary Arts