Backhand Through the Mother (Inanna Poetry & Fiction Series)

Poetry. Jewish Studies. In this second collection of poetry, Renee Norman picks up several thematic threads from her award-winning first book, True Confessions, and weaves them into poems about mothering, aging and loss set in amongst the cultural traditions of family and Judaism. Relationships between mothers and daughters celebrated, deconstructed, and mourned, as the poems resonate with the slippage of time and the emptiness of hands once full and busy. Norman writes about the poignancy of motherhood, set against her own aging and the illness, death, and widowhood of aging parents. She also writes hopefully and with some humour as she navigates her daughter's growing pains, middle-age, her Jewish background, and the legacies our parents leave us.