Mother/land

Reading ... Ananda Lima's MOTHER / LAND (Black Lawrence Press, 2021) - I experience AL's poems as a thinking and feeling through motherland, mother tongue, and motherhood--of a son--deeply concerned with safety and surveillance, using aperture and exposure, the avant-garde--Tropicalismo (Caetana Veloso)--and the improvisational--jazz (Nathaniel Mackey), pulling together Brazilian mythology, musical and artistic traditions with poetic experiments to document and bring to the fore what remains--from which this poet and photographer makes her art--"everything / infused in sunlight"

Thank you to Books Go Social and NetGalley for the Advanced Reader's Copy!Now available.Eloquent and elusive, Ananda Lima's Mother/Land is a meditation on motherhood, motherland and Mother tongue. Flowing effortlessly between Portuguese and English, the book takes place in a liminal space between Brazil and America. As a new Mother myself, I deeply related to Lima's worries of not being rooted in either culture enough & how that would impact her parenting. A great debut collection!

This collection of poetry is a must-read. It focuses on motherhood and immigration. It’s written from the perspective of an immigrant mother of an American child. Some of the poems broke my heart. The poem, “When they come for us on the 7 train” almost had me in tears and I can’t stop thinking about that piece. I really enjoyed how Ananda Lima had both English and Portuguese mixed in the poems.