A Daughter's Work Is Heartless by Nature

<p>A brave and evocative meditation on motherlove which considers how we rebuild ourselves after loss.</p><p>Caledonia Kearns’ first collection of poems published at 49 is an attempt to meet Muriel Rukeyser’s challenge “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?/The world would split open”. Kearns’ poems tell the story of an ordinary woman raising a daughter as a second-generation single mother as she recreates herself after marriage negotiates lovers lost and found and navigates the quotidian.</p><p>From Kearns’ childhood in Dorchester Massachusetts (“the streets of that other city/were so quiet it was always a lonely dark”) to her daughter’s childhood during the first wave of gentrification in Brooklyn (“This is Brooklyn now./ The antenna factories across the street are long gone”) it is a deeply urban story.</p><p>Told in four parts Kearns begins—“Coming from where I do/there was no choice but to bet on the filly.” She moves on to explore the reconstruction of the self after the end of a marriage and the search for connection. The collection ends with a reckoning—her daughter’s depression and hospitalization before she leaves for college: “I don’t want to say/sometimes my daughter wants to die/but if I don’t there’s no saving her/sometimes my daughter wants to die.” Along the way her daughter’s voice infuses the occasional commentary: “How you think/you fucked me up/is not how/you fucked me up.”</p><p>Clear-eyed and persistent the virtue of “A Daughter’s Work Is Heartless by Nature” is its straightforward accessible lyric its relentless search for beauty in the day-to-day.</p>