Mother Quiet

aWhat is the difference, asks Martha Rhodes, between forgetting and being forgotten? Why do our most primal images of self-definition - the house, the childhood bedroom, the motheras body - become more vaporous the more we speak? The poems of Mother Quiet donat just ask these questions; they inhabit these questions. . . . aThe inside of her mouth was black and airless,a says Rhodes of the dead mother, and the image is at once a poetas blessing and a poetas curse. Weird, dark, hilarious, direct, otherworldly - these poems display a poet in command of every note the English language is capable of sounding. They will not be silenced: they are unforgettable.a - James Longenbach, author of Fleet River and Modern Poetry after Modernism. Martha Rhodes is the author of two previous collections, Perfect Disappearance and At the Gate. She teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, New School University, and at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She is a founding editor and the director of the independent literary press Four Way Books.