Mouths Open to Name Her

Mouths Open to Name Her , Katie Bickham’s dazzling new collection, resounds with the intensity of new motherhood and confronts the relationship between mothers and their children, as she explores what it means to carry a child, even one conceived by rape or “a child born from no place, from the flame of her forgetting, / bracket of blank pages. The boy, too, was destined to forget— / a bird from no tree branch, fish from no river, sword from no forge.” Moving from the mid-1800s to 2017, these fi