My first poetry chapbook, The Invented Mother, was a finalist in The New Women’s Voices Chapbook Competition 2022 and will be published in Fall 2023 by Finishing Line Press.
Advance Praise for THE INVENTED MOTHER
In her stunning debut collection, The Invented Mother, Thea Goodman questions and explores the shifting notions of identity and the vicissitudes of parenthood. With complex syntax, lush imagery and associative leaps, these poems plumb emotional depths. Thea Goodman strikes a stance uniquely her own in this stellar chapbook.
—Elise Paschen, author of The Nightlife
From “desert dust that swirls like advice” to the “bones of dead pronouns,” and coyotes who prowl across poems, Thea Goodman’s new collection kicks up wisdom, beauty, despair, love, sex, and rejuvenation. Her range is vast; from free verse to sonnets, Goodman’s poems reframe what was once familiar into something fresh and complex. Spinning motherhood, babyhood, selfhood, and transformation into kaleidoscopic wonder, these poems examine how we make and unmake our lives and selves. “I died early and am a tourist on earth,” Goodman writes, and in this and other lovely, funny moments, readers will be reminded how lucky we are that she made these poems — lyrical visitations from a supremely talented and thoughtful poet.
––Rachel DeWoskin, author of absolute animal and Two Menus
In a Thea Goodman poem the speaker-mother’s reasoning is ravenous, her discourse, vigorously original, bitingly sonic. The internal rhymes in the poems of her debut collection braid color, light, and ideas into music that is rarely straightforward, but utterly compelling. An example of the invented self as a new mother appears vividly in “After,” The spring drops white petals hot / snow upon limestone pavers that smell like // sex. Goodman plays with form that introduces parentheticals and fragments that ricochet on the page. These poems are both timeless and of-the- moment, as in “Bones of Dead Pronouns”: I remember / the hose splitting the sun, my thumb on the nozzle, high / shrieks of summer, when they were a girl. At the heart of this truly ravishing poetry is a plaintive voice giving new shape to experience, and making art of it, art you will ponder and savor.
– Elaine Sexton, author of Drive
About THE INVENTED MOTHER
The poems in The Invented Mother question the social construction and the reality of mothering, parenting children that defy the gender binary, and the mystery of family relationships on a changing planet.
The book will be available for pre-order after May 2023 and can be purchased here!
The cover design is still in-progress but you can see the art work on my homepage. The cover art is by Iris Bernblum and is a painting based on my poem “Early March” which you can read below.
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Early March
Not one coyote prowling
the school, but a pack, eating
the heads off the pink tulips
and administrative boxwoods.
Molting daffodils and leeks,
cold ankles, too thin jacket
makes memory of new outfits,
dust of desire and cigarettes
on 86th Street, smooth
apples of our unlined cheeks
to an orchard in Queens
and my grandfather whistling, gay
hands cutting forsythia.
”Early March” was written in 2020 just before the global pandemic at a time when the world was already in chaos and the coyote sitings, one of many signs of environmental degradation, felt like a portent.
I studied poetry with Elaine Sexton.
Elaine’s latest book is Drive and she teaches at The Writing Institute at Sarah Lawrence and independently.
Read my poem “Summer Novel” here.