Ghost-Mother by Valerie Bacharach

How does a daughter, haunted by the death of her mother, honor the enormity of this loss? How does a daughter, carved out by absence, learn to recuperate the spaces of this hollowing? In Ghost-Mother, through a series of exquisite poems that mourn her mother’s harrowing decline and passing, Valerie Bacharach explores the contours of grief: its helplessness, its guilt, its inexorable longings. In many of these poems, the poet witnesses stunned or wounded birds, and indeed, this seems the perfect metaphor for the uncomfortable and painful act of a child holding space for a parent’s physical disintegration—in which the inevitable transformation to flight and song comes at the cost of great personal sorrow. These are ultimately poems of praise for the beauty and evanescence of life—a paean to knowing what to set free and what to hold fast to (“Sparks from a just-lit match / an arc of moon”), as catalogued within the glowing amber hues of the gorgeous final poem.

–Lee Ann Roripaugh, Author of Tsunami vs. the Fukushima 50