Overview

The Mother Wart is a book of prose poems loosely based around the tenets of the Church of Euthanasia, whose only commandment--for both ethical and practical reasons--is ""thou shalt not breed."" Looking beyond the movement's environmental and social goals, The Mother Wart delves into an autobiographical meditation on early memories and associations with motherhood, childbirth, infancy, and female sexuality, emphasizing the importance of early childhood trauma in the decision to abstain from having children of one's own. In its thick fog of sound play, close-set cycles of internal rhyme evoke a nursery rhyme starting to spin off-kilter, a grade-school chant turned violent and unpredictable. This is the version of the fairy tale in which the witch wins. But here, the witch is also mother, the origins of life transformed into a sign of virus (the wart). The grotesque, therefore, figures heavily throughout these poems, especially in the sense of Mary Russo's The Female Grotesque, which points out the pregnant female body constitutes the epitome of the human form as a site of volatile and irrepressible change--traversing that rare region between revulsion and attraction, in which the two at last appear not so opposed after all, but rather the respective poles of a dividing line that in fact comes full circle if followed far and fearlessly enough.

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9781732682795

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Reviews

The Mother Wart knocked me out and woke me up. Dylan Krieger is a breathtaking prophet of a writer, raw and exacting and viciously real. She evokes gut-deep horror and rage and longing with stunning clarity. I have such a crush on her words. -- Betsy Cornwell, author of Mechanica and The Circus Rose Take your Tinder dates to Krieger's macabre symphony, and there will be no ambiguity. Her rhymed terminal secretions are headed straight for the double grave. Sodomy is not for the spit- or shit-shy. Biological clocks are wrong all the time, biological cocks even wronger. You haven't had the finest until you've dined on your own kind. You haven't lived until you've let these poems eat you alive. This book has big death energy. It destigmatizes cannibalism and legalizes murder and decriminalizes suicide. It makes fucking evil again. --Kim Vodicka, author of Psychic Privates Dylan Krieger weaves verse and sound into angelic union. Like a song you can't get out of your head, her rapid-fire words dance with each other harmoniously into an all-encompassing feeling. The Mother Wart is one of the best collections I've read in years. I can't wait to read my copy until its binding comes undone. 12/10. -- William Seward Bonnie, author of Marijuana Breakfast and World Series Christ

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