Bluewords Greening

Bluewords Greening is a book about motherhood—love and family and fear and failure and mini-ninjas. We observe a mother’s bewildering experiences with her son as the poems detail his diagnosis with a rare form of epilepsy and the “bluewords” that result from his aphasia. The speaker is in deep conversation with the son’s frustrated and often surprisingly beautiful lexicon; she’s also in conversation with the work of contemporary visual artists and the craft of printmaking and the twelfth-century visionary, St. Hildegard. Stewart-Nuñez’s music and skilled syntax and stubborn insistence on the beauty of the world—even as the poems explore the heartbreak of recurrent miscarriage—keep the reader rapt and grateful and illuminated. Bluewords Greening is a marvelous book.
—Beth Ann Fennelly, Great With Child: Letters to a Young Mother