Tender hooks Book

I was drawn to Beth Ann Fennelly's poetry after first reading "Telling the Gospel Truth" in The Kenyon Review:

I want to womanize
the Bible, rend it, render it homey,
homemade, I lust to cut-and-paste.


Let us start with the stable.
Let it be a real stable, and let Mary be angry
at the filth of it, at dust sifting from the rafters.
Let her grow resigned as cracks of light are grouted by night,
let her grow out of mind
as the invisible fist grabs guts
and twists,
then twists harder,

This poem was a slap that woke me up and got my attention. With its long exploration of birth, the Bible, loss, and motherhood, it expanded my ideas of what a poem can be and can do.

"Tender Hooks," which includes this poem, takes the themes of motherhood and faith, loss and hope, and crawls deep under the skin with them. At times, the honesty, depth, and extent of Fennelly's emotions over the loss of her first child takes me out of my comfort zone. This is a good thing. This book contains poems that challenge me to face unspoken fears, but it also contains moments that cherish infancy, that celebrate the mother-child bond, and that revel in the strange fascination all parents feel with their children.

In the end, this is a book that resonates with me because I'm the mother of two young daughters and also because it is poetry that illuminates and reveals in unexpected ways.