The Invented Mother

The Invented Mother explores cultural notions and daily realities of our most elemental relationships, as well as gender, sexuality, nature and creation. Its poems are full of wonder: What is a mother? What is natural and what is constructed? How do words define us? Here, acts of care, creativity and violence are subjects that begin with awe of the natural world.  Written in a variety of forms, animals, food, color and light animate verse that evokes the mysteries of love on a changing planet.

ADVANCE PRAISE

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 

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.
–Elaine Sexton, author of Drive

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