Price: $14.99
Page Count: 108
Publication Date: October 2012
ISBN: 978-1-927335-09-3
My mother did not tell stories— instead, passed around our sticky kitchen table warnings, worries, laments, teatime croonings, that diluted childhood, muted its paintbox primary with shadings and greys from the dark pages of adult discouragement. Being a man is hard work— don’t ask your brother to dry the dishes. Or, My father never wanted us—the CCF took up his whole heart. About Grandma Elsie, dead when I closed the first circle of seasons, My mother kept running away, but her Irish relations could only afford to send her home. To “your husband.” I was never so happy as when they called after me, in Belfast, “Hey Canada!” Felt like a comic- book heroine, my tits turned pointy as maple leaves. —from “My mother Did Not Tell stories”
My Mother Did Not Tell Stories challenges simplistic or sentimental maternal, familial and cultural narratives, by offering contemporary perspectives on women caught between the generations, between self and other, independence and relatedness. Encountering new environments and extended family and community ties, the women in these poems are inspired to make larger links between human, animal, cultural, geographical, political and spiritual realities. But like her first two books, Kruk’s third also focuses on narratives of the heart, speaking in three voices: the mother moving and growing through new chapters of parenting (My Mother Did Not Tell Stories), the former urbanite and Southerner meeting /varieties of “wilderness” at her Ontario ‘camp’ (River Valley Poems), and the Twenty-First Century citizen witnessing and reflecting on the different ways we re-draw our borders while occasionally risking enlarging the circle (Drawing Circles).
Dedication: For my mother, Betty and my daughters, Elena and Bobbie-Ann:
my support and my inspiration across the generations.
Table of Contents/Order of Poems:
Part I: My Mother Did Not Tell Stories
First Birds
Heart Exercise
Reliquary
Made in China
Good-Enough Friday
Skywheel: Niagara Falls, Canada
Pierced
“MAW!”
Scratching Tree
Between Women
Chuba, or What She Did for It
my mother did not tell stories
Part II: River Valley Poems
Dump Day
Phobophobe
After-Earth: second spring
Storekeeper
Fisher
The Temagami Speaks
Building the Outhouse
Ritual of the Mass
Widowmaker
Things that Go Thump in the Night
Sign Language
River Valley Rapture
Lessons from the Rivers
Part III: Drawing Circles
Boat Trip to James Bay
Translating the Bush
Weight Time
For Three Nights Only
The In-Laws for Christmas Dinner
Blown Job
Catching the Rabbit
Delivery Man
Bob, Flying
In the Web
How to Look Good Naked
Born and raised in the suburbs of Toronto, Laurie Kruk is currently Associate Professor of English Studies at Nipissing University in North Bay. Specializing in Canadian Literature, Kruk has published scholarly essays on Carol Shields, Timothy Findley, Joy Kogawa and others, as well as The Voice is the Story: Conversations with Canadian Writers of Short Fiction (Mosaic, 2003). Her poetry has been published in over twenty literary and academic journals or anthologies, culminating in two collections. Her first collection, Theories of the World (Netherlandic Press, 1992), traces the struggle to move from (sheltered, suburban) girlhood to womanhood. Her second, Loving the Alien (Your Scrivener Press, 2006), deals more explicitly with adult relationships, concluding with her initiation into the joy and struggle of mothering.
