Motherland

In Motherland, poet Heather Nelson leaves subjects like war, pestilence, and looming environmental catastrophe to others. Instead, she focuses her camera on the "ordinary" - observing how our bodies change with time, considering motherhood, and offering sharp, often poignant commentary on people and places in her life. She engages these subjects with intelligence, humor, a quiet elegance, and a touch of melancholy that brings depth to her musings. These are poems that reward repeat visits.

-Charles Coe, Charles Coe: New and Selected Works



If Motherland is a boat navigating desire, memory, and change, Heather Nelson is coxswain - both tender and unflinching voice - guiding us through the passage of years, the pull of place. These poems form a collection of familiar, foreign, and dreamed landscapes. From dawn over Harvard Square to reimagining one's own shadow in an Italian piazza at midday, to Provincetown, just beyond the sea, that "curls with longing," Nelson engages melancholy, mischief, and joy. She declares of motherhood, "my body occupied, my arms always open," and cautions, as self-reclamation, "I chew brigadier bones," imagines riding through the city "bare chested on horseback."Intimate and universal threads of womanhood, longing, and the shifting "floodplain" of midlife map a reckoning with aging, family, and the aching beauty of what remains and what is lost, the way a city holds its history in brick and border because "without boundaries, there is no home."

-Tzynya Pinchback, how to make pink confetti



Heather Nelson's perceptive and genuine debut collection, Motherland, is punctuated by longing and "fear of erasure." Immersing us in sensory detail en route to profound observations of human desire, these poems draw from the everyday life of a mother, teacher, and poet whose children are slowly leaving the house, and who sometimes just hates "every blossom for its derisive youthfulness and fertility." They are also full of spank: "Motherly love is / a form of Stockholm Syndrome." Brutally honest, while also nuanced and original in its articulation of the restlessness of the human condition, this collection provokes us to ask ourselves: Who are we? What is our value in this world? What makes us sufficient? This debut carries sagacious and earnest weight, a witness to our insatiable, existential hunger.

-Ewa Chrusciel, Yours, Purple Gallinule and six other books