Poisonous If Eaten Raw

By Alyda Faber

In this experimental long poem sequence, Alyda Faber transforms the portrait poem into runic shapes, ice shelved, sculpted, louvered on a winter shoreline. Twenty years after her mother's death, Faber untethers herself from the mother she thinks she knows with wild analogies: depicting her mother variously as King Lear's Kent, a Camperdown elm, a black-capped chickadee, Neil Peart, Pope Innocent X, and a funnel spider.

While embodying the passionate relationship between mother and daughter, Faber's poems also expose the thorn in the flesh -- the inability of mother and daughter to give each other what they most want to give. Endlessly discovered, yet ultimately unknowable, the poet's mother is complex, mystifying, and unwavering: courageous in her decision to leave all that she knew behind; bewildering in her fidelity to a damaging marriage; steadfast in her devotion to a God who is at once adamant and the source of ephemeral beauty.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 177310179X
• ISBN13: 9781773101798
• Release Date: March 2021
• Publisher: Goose Lane Editions
• Length: 104 Pages
• Weight: 0.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.5" x 8.4"