My Mother Did Not Tell Stories

My Mother Did Not Tell Stories challenges simplistic or sentimental maternal, familial and cultural narratives, by offering contemporary perspectives on women caught between the generations, between self and other, independence and relatedness. Encountering new environments and extended family and community ties, the women in these poems are inspired to make larger links between human, animal, cultural, geographical, political and spiritual realities. But like her first two books, Kruk's third also focuses on narratives of the heart, speaking in three voices: the mother moving and growing through new chapters of parenting (My Mother Did Not Tell Stories), the former urbanite and Southerner meeting /varieties of "wilderness" at her Ontario 'camp' (River Valley Poems), and the Twenty-First Century citizen witnessing and reflecting on the different ways we re-draw our borders while occasionally risking enlarging the circle (Drawing Circles).