To Bend and Braid

In spare couplets that echo the intensity of the mother-child relationship, Emily Patterson's gorgeous new collection captures the intimacy, fear, and beauty of early parenthood. The poems are impressive in their attention to the usual blur of early motherhood, with its typical selflessness and sleep deprivation, as they awaken again and again to wonder. If you, like me, neglected to fully absorb the mystery of those deceptively simple first years, To Bend and Braid offers you the rare gift to revisit them again-this time with an illuminating guide.

Heather Lanier, author of Raising a Rare Girl



In these tender and carefully crafted poems, Patterson paints an individual experience of early motherhood while embracing that which connects us and makes us all human-coming from another's body: "its familiar / weight . . . the kind we both knew from our / mothers' bodies, our earliest nights." To Bend and Braid teaches us to welcome small and grand wonders; from the ancient oak to the miniscule moth, Patterson shows us how motherhood transforms the world around us "exactly and not at all as we began."

Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach, author of 40 WEEKS



To Bend and Braid is an unabashed catalog of love and discovery: a child discovers the world, and a mother discovers a new way of seeing. In delicate, observational lyrics, Emily Patterson upends the idea of parent as teacher and guide. Instead, as mother and daughter travel through field and forest and dinner table, the mother recognizes how she is being transformed: "You are no slate, blank or otherwise- / it's the world and me, awaiting your color." Patterson reminds us of everyday miracles; her book invites us to encounter the world anew.

Emily Pérez, author of What Flies Want, winner of the Iowa Prize



Patterson weaves a collection of lyrical prose in her chapbook, To Bend and Braid, which explores motherhood's conflict of holding on and letting go. Many of her poems focus on themes of motherhood and its everyday quality, the witnessing of the unfolding of a childhood, and the awe and simultaneous helplessness knowing children will forge their own roads. To Bend and Braid tries to make sense of the uncertain terrain and the poems serve as a refuge to soothe the prickly texture of what it means to reckon with motherhood.

Rudri Bhatt Patel