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9781959118985

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"Darla Mottram's stunning debut is a visceral living map through the fraught, fragmented terrain of early childhood. This is not an account of healing or wholeness (""no: recovery narrative"") but a sacred act of steadfast witness, bearing forth ""a song not wanting to be/ sung, but a song, nevertheless."" Mottram peers into the voids that memory and abandonment leave behind, ""into / the eyes of the thing swallowing you."" From the enigmatic gaze of her infant self staring at something glimmering out of the frame of a photograph to harrowing fragments of caseworker accounts, letters, and legal documents, every detail serves as a haunted signpost in Mottram's quest to make contact with her origins - a feral genesis tale whose rifts and lacunae make wholeness obsolete. Here ghosts aren't exorcised or embraced, but etched in the living mirror of the poet, where the self's own body bears their likeness (""... it is difficult to tell where my mother ends & I begin""). Gothic and haunting, the poetry turns in on itself recursively, edges bleed between world and self. RECURRENT is a bold but not unflinching text - in fact, it trembles - live, shimmering ouroboros of a book that brings us always back to the unanswered question of how we begin. -Stephanie Adams-Santos, author of Dream of Xibalba and Swarm Queen's Crown In RECURRENT, Darla Mottram brushes family history against the grain, using exquisitely crafted poetic texts to question, amplify, expose, undermine, and redeem a documentary and archival chronicle of abandonments and temporary retrievals. In the process, she actively exhibits why it is only poetry, through its own peculiar linguistic and formal deviances, that can even try to resuscitate the life-worlds and the lived realities of those people, including herself, whose shades flicker around the edges of bureaucratic reports, photographs, letters, and fragmentary memories, ""like something's glimmering / out there / beyond documentation..."" Mottram juxtaposes the documents themselves with searing poems that are hyper-alert to the different claims of literal and emotional ""truths"" which different kinds of pictorial and textual representation lay claim to. From the beginning the reader is implicated in an absolutely necessary recurrent questing and questioning that will unravel the received comfortable meanings of words like ""family"", ""mother"", ""love"", ""loss"", ""past"", ""self"". And as much as it is Mottram's deeply and uniquely personal self-excavation that is the driving energy of this book, you cannot come away from it without sensing your own biography or biographical fictions becoming complicated and troubled. And you realize that Darla Mottram may have given you an incredible, perhaps life-altering gift out of her own pain: ""the freedom to continue carrying forth // what can't be abandoned"" -Ger Killeen, author of Ju�rOz and Blood Orbits"

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Darla Mottram (they/she) is a poet, writer, and visual artist based in Portland, Oregon. They created and ran Gaze, an online literary journal, from 2018-2021. RECURRENT is their first book.

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