Rachel Bower's accomplished debut collection seeks to recover the lived experiences of women who have often appeared only fleetingly in official histories. The poems push towards a more expansive concept of motherhood, including our collective responsibilities for lives, environments and natural worlds. With heartfelt lyricism, Bower weaves stories of labour and love. In moments of fear and determination for survival, this collection is a hymn to the people and places which shape us. "In Rachel Bower's powerful new collection, you will find mothers displaced, mothers deceived, mothers labouring to stay sane and alive. But woven amongst any vulnerability is a fierce celebration of the mother-body, opened up to prove the unique and complex stories each one holds. I am grateful to Bower for finding these women - historical, biblical, autobiographical - and offering me such inventive, arresting poems, brim-full with blistering truths." - Rebecca Goss, Poet "Powerful, compelling and exquisitely crafted, These Mothers of Gods is a tour-de-force of female-focussed storytelling." - Teika Marija Smits, Writer and Editor "Rachel Bower's poems show us mothering as we've never seen it before, through time, history, and mythology. The collection centres the voice of the other, while conveying poignant experiences of joy, elation, triumph and hardness. These image-rich verses are poems of intense curiosity and beauty." - Jason Allen-Paisant

These Mothers of Gods

Literature & Fiction

Bower, Rachel

Poetry

Fly on the Wall Press

<div>This book examines the striking resurgence of the literary letter at the end of the long twentieth century. It explores how authors returned to epistolary conventions to create dialogue across national, linguistic and cultural borders and repositions a range of contemporary and postcolonial authors never considered together before, including Monica Ali, John Berger, Amitav Ghosh, Michael Ondaatje and Alice Walker.&nbsp;Through a series of situated readings, the book shows how the return to epistolarity is underpinned by ideals relating to dialogue and human connection. Several of the works use letters to present non-anglophone material to the anglophone reader. Others use letters to challenge policed borders: the prison, occupied territory, the nation state. Elsewhere, letters are used to connect correspondents in different cultural and linguistic contexts. Common to all of the works considered in this book is the appeal that they make to us, as readers, and the responsibility they place on us to respond to this address. </div> <div>By taking the epistle as its starting point and pursuing Auerbach's speculative ideal of weltliteratur, this book turns away from the dominant trend of 'distant reading' in world literature, and shows that it is in the close situated analysis of form and composition that the concept of world literature emerges most clearly. This study seeks to re-think the ways in which we read world literature and shows how the literary letter, in old and new forms, speaks powerfully again in this period.</div>

Epistolarity and World Literature, 1980-2010 (New Comparisons in World Literature)

History & Criticism

PALGRAVE~MACMILLAN

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