Carrie Nassif’s visionary and cutting-edge collection explores the heat and blood, magic, grief and ecstasy of motherhood, particularly how this rite of passage and change of status transforms who we are from the inside out. As she writes in one poem, “a child emerges from the vapor first/ and everything else collapses to become its mother.” Her tilting imagery and daring rhymes take us into a wider view of how language and life can unfold even after, as she writes, “they tell me perspective is a vanishing line.” This is a powerful and original journey into what’s often beyond or outside our tired and true words.
–Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, Kansas Poet Laureate Emeritus
Carrie Nassif’s lithopaedion takes us on a journey from the small, stony, and painful— “too deep for a blackened needle / to pry ourselves out like a sliver”—up through the expansive sky and into the stars. Nassif tells us through this beautifully crafted collection that the journey, while not without its thorns, and the choices that we make during it are where we are truly born, “reverberations of afterbirth spiraling within us all.” I marvel at Nassif’s intricate and unexpected imagery of birth, motherhood, and flight, and will return to this collection again and again.
–Issa M. Lewis, author of Anchor and Infinite Collisions
A glorious, feeling contribution to poetry. lithopedion is an expressive journey of mothering and being mothered. These poems form a lively constellation of pulsing light and nurturing connection.
–Karen Poppy, author of Crack Open/Emergency, Every Possible Thing, and our own beautiful brutality
The poems in lithopaedion are as rare as the condition they describe. They are the opposite of calcification. Rather, they float and tremble, amble and pulse in both multiple fluid concentrics, and one long continuum that tiptoe from poem to poem. The book billows a steady stream of surprising images that bubble around each other like fandango dancers, not consummating, absorbing, or dissolving the other, but existing most fully in the spaces between the steps – between the words – sentences cut wide across the page and on the bias, stretching into all the sorrows held so tenderly that one wants to swaddle them and carry them home for comfort. But they are their own comfort. This book has all it needs and more.
–Peggy Dobreer, author of Forbidden Plums
In this collection – startling and visceral – Carrie Nassif uses language like a blade slicing nature open and revealing boundless connections, unsparing hunger, and raw beauty. These poems touch on what makes us human, both animal and spirit; they brush against the cosmic, the material, the carnal, and the everyday.
–David Orr, artist and curator
Lithopaedion is a deeply moving and powerful collection of poems borne in the fecund world where mothers are bearing daughters, even as they look back at their own mothers; where the female body, strong and natural is emerging from an uncultivated world, a world fertile, yet susceptible to weakness, to death. Lineage is at the heart of these poems. They are full with birth, afterbirth, intergenerational trauma, but motherhood is their force. This is a collection to read again and again.
–Rachel Neve-Midbar, author of Salaam of Birds
Nancy Murphy (verified owner) –
This is a highly original and stunning set of poems. The author pushes language and syntactical boundaries in the most interesting way, and in the service of her ideas. There is tremendous freedom here and a density of imagery and language that makes one gasp at times. Lines that soar like, “dark branches veining across the sinking canopy/spilling their night back into the sky.” A book I will reread and enjoy for a long time. Highly recommend!