mother
Penguin Poets
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mother
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Narrated by:
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m.s. RedCherries
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Written by:
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m.s. RedCherries
About this listen
FINALIST FOR THE 2024 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR POETRY
“This is an incredibly powerful book of poetry that is also fiction but it is so real, and singular, as to defy definition, and I defy anyone to read it and come away unchanged.”—Tommy Orange, author of There There and Wandering Stars
A stunning, multimorphic work of poetry and prose about Indigenous identity
mother is a work rooted in an intimate fracture: an Indigenous child is adopted out of her tribe and raised by a non-Indian family. As an adult finding her way back to her origins, our unnamed narrator begins to put the pieces of her birth family's history together through the stories told to her by her mother, father, sister, and brother, all of whom remained on the reservation where she was born. Through oral histories, family lore, and imagined pasts and futures, a collage of their community emerges, raising profound questions about adoption, inheritance, and Indigenous identity in America.
Through poetic vignettes whose unconventional forms mirror the nonlinear, patchwork process of constructing a sense of self, m.s. RedCherries has crafted an indelible and utterly original work about the winding roads that lead us home.
©2024 m.s. RedCherries (P)2024 Penguin AudioWhat the critics say
“mother is at once a story, a memory, and a dream. 'Riddled with shadowed humor that would bait the consciousness,' these poems tenderly, vulnerably, and fearlessly sequence threads of familial bonds, heredity, and Indigenous identity. With a captivating and conversant voice, m.s. RedCherries maps the intersections of the historical with the personal and deftly binds the two like strands of DNA, creating the spark of life that courses through this vital work.”—2024 National Book Awards Judges' Citation
“mother presents a poignant exploration of Indigenous identity, the relationship between daughters and mothers, and the universal desire to find a way home.”—National Book Foundation
“RedCherries, a citizen of the Northern Cheyenne Nation, introduces her debut by noting that it is wholly fiction—a touch that accents how novelistic the book is in quilting verse and prose to tell the story of an adoptee reuniting with her birth family.”—The New York Times Book Review