The Tree at the Center

The Tree at the Center is a beautiful debut volume of poetry that is intelligent and sincere in its look at our wilderness mother, indeed our Heavenly Mother, and the language of women. This book breaks through silence and is also full of an honest look at the speaker’s own experience with motherhood. The poems speak about a voice, at this / distant opening in the sky / not of humankind, not of beast or rain, / that breaks my heart / open as Rilke’s birds do (“Horizon”). In that rich language and voice found here we get to experience something both new and familiar and dear. Something that stirs and is wild. In Kathryn’s words: There / is the Mother, on bended knee / in the great mind of the body, / spurring the horses on / and on and on (“Labor”).—Laura Stott, author of In the Museum of Coming and Going