Mouths Open to Name Her

<p>Mouths Open to Name Her Katie Bickham's dazzling new collection resounds with the intensity of new motherhood and confronts the relationship between mothers and their children as she explores what it means to carry a child even one conceived by rape or "a child born from no place from the flame of her forgetting / bracket of blank pages. The boy too was destined to forget-- / a bird from no tree branch fish from no river sword from no forge." Moving from the mid-1800s to 2017 these finely wrought poems grapple with how war violence and enslavement can disrupt our innocence. Bickham emphasizes the power of creation in spite of this: "Just picture them all" she writes "350000 babies together at once / a city's worth of them in a row or a circle or wrapped / in an acres-wide blanket an army of innocence yawning / their first breaths over the globe and the promise / that it will all happen again just like this just as imperfectly / no matter what / tomorrow." Mouths Open to Name Her calls forth a global sisterhood that extends from Charleston South Carolina and Shreveport Louisiana to Nice France; Buenos Aires Argentina; and the Serengeti District Tanzania.</p>