Crow Funeral Cover Reveal

Forthcoming March 2022

“God doesn’t know a thing about mothers”

If you take God out of women, there is no God. Kate Hanson Foster’s world is a beautiful barn, a frightening mind, and a shimmering street. A timeless America.

— Kristin Hersh

American singer-songwriter and author of Seeing Sideways: A Memoir of Music and Motherhood

Through poems of motherhood, mortality, loss and faith, Kate Hanson Foster’s collection Crow Funeral posits what it means to not only make a secure home for your children, but to become the literal dwelling place. From gestation through birth and the accrual of days spent mothering, Hanson Foster circles the challenges and hard truths all mothers must face. Hanson Foster’s unflinching examination of post-partum depression and anxiety is tempered with love letters to her children:

“I became a mom / only once, you know. // You are the bike / I learned to ride.”

She writes stark lyrics for home, her complicated relationship with Catholicism, her husband as father and lover, and most powerfully, her own body. Hanson Foster not only honors her body’s capability to bear and sustain children and nurture a family, but sings praises to its sensuality. Crow Funeral depicts the unique intimacy between a mother and her children, an intimacy which sometimes blurs the line between “me” and “we,” that which “God doesn’t / know a thing about,” fraught with overwhelming love and shot through with ferocity.

— Sarah Sousa

Author of Hex and See the Wolf

In Crow Funeral, drama and desire build line by line and poem by poem. The work here is intensely personal. The narrative and its themes concern specific human beings, yet they maintain a universal posture that calls all of us closer to our humanity. Kate Hanson Foster is a poet of uncommon wit, charm, candor, and clarity. She keeps her focus on the poems, not the poet, and deploys her abundant skills to create an enduring and important testament that is simultaneously devastating and hopeful.

— Michael Kleber-Diggs

Author of Worldy Things, winner of the 2020 Max Ritvo Poetry Prize

Friends: I Have a Big Announcement! I Have a Book Deal!

Friends: I have a big announcement! Yesterday I signed a contract with EastOver Press to publish my book of poems titled, Crow Funeral. As many of you know, this is a book I once gave up on. I never wanted to publicly bury my book, but I needed some grand, (albeit dramatic) gesture to find peace in saying goodbye to a manuscript that I had put everything of myself into for 5 years.

I owe an immense amount of gratitude to my friends, you know who you are, who eventually forced me to dig the words back up again. “I’m retired” I said. “Join this Zoom writing group,” you said. I added new poems, I took poems out, I stopped submitting for over a year. It felt good to write only for the voice that lives inside me. The Crow Funeral that will be published is not the book I buried. It is a different kind of story now, even if many of the original poems remain.

I want to thank EOP editor, Denton Loving for that phone call I never thought I’d get—for believing in my work, and wanting to put it out into the world. EastOver Press is the home where my book belongs, and I’m so thrilled. Crow Funeral will be published in spring/summer 2022.

Want to know a little bit about what a Crow Funeral is?

I have an essay I wrote that talks a bit about it here.

Thank you again to all of you that continue to believe in me and what I write. I really do have some pretty sweet friends…and a husband who is my biggest fan.

Love,

Kate

Dear World Wide Web:

Dear World Wide Web:

 

I write to you from another Saturday. The kids are suiting up to go sledding. Marianne Faithfull’s “Beware of Darkness” is playing in the living room. Watch out now, take care, beware the thoughts that linger, winding up inside your head…

 

In our little log home-bubble I can turn off the TV and forget everything but this. I’ve memorized every grain of wood in the knotted pine walls. I’ve repainted the only two rooms with drywall. I’ve changed the fixtures on all the cabinets and replaced the plastic light switch covers with new plastic light switch covers. In a little while, I’m going to plant the first seedlings of the season, and for the next few months my dining room table will be a makeshift greenhouse. This year’s garden is going to be unparalleled, I hope. Each year I carefully tend to every garden plant until Autumn flicks away the last worthwhile flower. I just ate cold Chinese Food and cracked a beer. Later I’ll nap, exercise, and then begin again. 

 

My dog follows me wherever I go. He is sleeping on my legs as I write. He whimpers when we are apart. He looks to my face to signal what’s next. I think it is funny how he gives me so much power—I can make him bark with excitement with just a hint of a smile. He loves it when I growl playfully and chase him around the house. I do not love him as much as I loved my last dog. 

 

I am sorry I haven’t returned your phone call. I probably still need to email or text you back. I didn’t wish you Happy Birthday. I didn’t thank you for wishing me a happy birthday. I have been avoiding the internet. How can I explain the weight of my shortcomings? Sometimes the chore of living is hard. The totality of me goes to the children. They get all my love, my joy, my jokes, clean laundry, and food. I am bad at so many things, but I will not fail when it comes to them. Every step of motherhood feels like the 11th hour of a crucial deadline I cannot miss. 

 

I wish I could say I have been writing or reading. I have not. My time alone is fleeting. The kids have finished sledding. Soon I will make them lunch. I told them if they don’t let me finish writing I will return them for a refund and move to an island, and so I think I bought myself some time. Bert returned home with a bouquet flowers and some seedling starter soil. So much of what I have I do not deserve. I do not pause to cherish it.

 

 

Friends—last year was just so terrible. I’ve lost so much of me in it. But I know I am just the penumbra of a greater shadow—one ache among many. And so, as another day sloshes into the next, I write to you simply to say hello. I hope that you are well.

 

 

That Marianne Faithful song I mentioned has long since ended, but a line lingers:

 

Beware of sadness.

It can hit you
It can hurt you
Make you sore
And what is more,
That is not what
You are here for.

 

 

I miss you. I love you. I think of you often.

 

Love, 

 

Kate

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Poem in Nelle Journal & CMV Awareness

I am beyond thrilled to have a poem in latest issue of NELLE alongside some incredible women writers like Francesca Bell, Lynne Thompson, Alison Pelegrin, Lisa Beech Hartz, Lauren Camp, Sandra Meek and so many more. I have so much admiration for Lauren Goodwin Slaughter for all her hard work to make Nelle such a powerful magazine. Thank you, Lauren, for believing in my poem.

This poem, "Four for a Boy" means so much to me, because it deals with one of the biggest heartbreaks a woman can go through. It feels extra special to me that it lives in a mag that publishes all women. 

I have found a generous, anonymous donor who is willing to match the cost of buying a $10 subscription to NELLE and I will donate the tally from this post to the CMV foundation in memory of my sister, Emma's son, Shane.

In one click, you can support women writers, as well as a cause that is very dear to my heart. Please just Notify me that you subscribed so I can make an eventual total of the donation. I will be matching subscriptions with donations until the end of May 2020.

Subscription info is here:
https://www.uab.edu/cas/englishpublications/nelle/subscribe

To learn more about the CMV virus and the foundation, click here:

https://www.nationalcmv.org

Thanks so much for reading. 

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Dear Mugford

Dear Mugford,

I thought I would try to talk to you in a beautiful, quiet place where I know no one in the world goes: my website. 

Look! I’m starting with a joke. Today might be a little easier than yesterday. The truth is, I am just sitting on the couch trying to process these words through some formal gesture—that they might translate into a universal language-less knowing that will accompany you to wherever it is that dead dogs go. 

I thought about writing from the porch where we normally sit when I’m working on my computer, but it is still hard to look at the birds that we spent so many summers watching together. There are a lot of “hards” I didn’t think of when we knew it was time to say goodbye. I foolishly thought I’d feel some relief. You wouldn’t be struggling to get up to walk anymore. No more pain. No more humiliating falls up the porch steps. But you, my enormous English Mastiff, big as you were both in body and spirit, have left a large aching hole in the house. All day I feel like I am tiptoeing around it. Without warning I’ll fall in, and there I am on my hands and knees pressing my nose into the hardwood floor of the empty space that was once your dog bed. I run my fingers over the scuff marks in the wood made from your gigantic paw nails. I open the ring box over the sink and smell the bundle of fur I collected after I held and comforted you on the porch for the last time. The fur that fell as you comforted me back and flopped a knowing paw on my shoulder before we took that dreaded drive. And then life pulls me out of the hole again. Maeve needs to be driven to soccer. Dinner needs to be made. Henry has a piano lesson. And time continues to move you further away.

I cleaned the drool off the French doors almost immediately after we put you down. I couldn’t bear to see it. Now I can’t bear that the doors are still clean. In the over 10 years we’ve lived in this house that’s never happened. Even now, with you 4 days gone, a bundle of your hair will blow across the floor like tumble weed. It lets loose from some corner no matter how many times I sweep or vacuum. I know I have to accept that I’ll be finding remnants of your life with us for many years to come. 

Hey, remember that time you shook your head and your drool hit the ceiling? That was incredibly disgusting. Or the time Bert and I were watching a show, and you let out a fart so foul that you raised your heavy head and looked at us like, “Damn, it stinks like shit in here,” and you got up and left. I thought I wouldn’t miss the ugly things that came with your bigness. Your rhino-sized shits. Slipping on your drool. And the many times I stopped in my tracks as I was rushing around because of something or another and yelled, “Mugford! Why do you always have to be such a fucking mountain in the middle of everything!” I’m sorry for that. I’m sorry you couldn’t be the lap dog you always wanted to be. I’m sorry for the many small dogs that would visit and effortlessly leap up onto the couch while you were stuck on the floor letting out a big, “oh fuck that little shit” sigh. 

I took our new little shit, Arlo for a walk this morning. It was the same route we used to take when you were young and enjoyed walks. I ran into a woman who asked if Arlo was friendly. “I think so?” I said, unknowingly. “He’s just a puppy.” And she replied, “Oh, he seems so calm, so behaved.” I told her that he had an elderly Mastiff to show him the ropes. And she immediately knew who I was, where I lived, and the Mastiff I was talking about. “Oh, we always admired that beautiful dog.” It’s true, you’ve always been something of a celebrity, and not all dogs get that. When you’d accompany me outside to fill the bird feeders or wait for the kids to get off the bus, cars would often stop just to look in awe at you. Random adults and kids would often smother you with affection without warning. And you would always take it, or rather, you received it. Always thankful for attention however it came. I’ll never forget that time we took you to the Lowell Folk Festival and you were treated as one of the main attractions. We couldn’t turn a corner without someone wanting to pet you and talk about you. We heard, “Wow! look at that dog!” constantly, and the not-so-clever line we’ve gotten your entire life, “When are you going to put a saddle on that thing?!” 

Yeah, I won’t miss that.

When we were grappling with the decision to put you down. I said to Bert, “It feels like a chapter is ending.” And Bert said, “Are you kidding? Mugford is the volume that holds so many chapters.” And it’s true—you were the dream of how we saw our future. A big gentle dog that would guide us through so many monumental milestones. Our first home. Our marriage. Your largeness a faithful and concerned anchor at my feet as I waited through the labor pains of all three of our children. And you always greeted each baby with simple, unequivocal love. You saw us all through so many sleepless nights, the many tears, and so much laughter. You spent more time in the house than any of us. I can count on one hand how many times I have been alone here without you. And just like that, in a terrible instant—you have disappeared, and I am so very lonely with you gone.

Bert and I sat on the porch most of the weekend in what felt like our own private memorial service. The kind of lonely commemoration only animals receive because, well, if it’s not your animal no one truly feels it or understands. We talked about all of the things you must have seen from your various vantage points in and around the house. At one point we moved outside and placed two Adirondack chairs in a sunny spot in the yard, and let ourselves soak in the sun, just like you loved to do, no matter how hot it was. “We are enduring that one true thing, aren’t we?” Bert said. “The certainty of death. It is never certain that something will be born, but once it’s born, it is certain that it will die.” We always knew the day would come. I look at Arlo, and I know I am beginning the process again. A new volume with barely one chapter yet to fill it. He’s been keeping me company a lot, licking my tears away, ruining shoes, and pissing and shitting on the floor. For a little guy, he’s a mighty big distraction. I am thankful for that. 

Mugford, you were our closest friend. I wish we could have given you more. It’s not fair how much you loved us so unconditionally despite all of our flaws—always taking a back seat to the needs of others. When we were saying goodbye, I rested the entire weight of my body on top of you. You always loved that, to feel the literal weight of someone’s affection, no matter how heavy. You had a body built to hold it. I hope that you felt me as the needle entered your vein, and you drifted away from us. Maybe you saw us from above your big beautiful snore, your last breath, my head resting on your head, your head in Bert’s hands—and us both not knowing what else to say other than another true thing: “You are such a good boy. Such a good boy. Such a good boy…you’re Him.” 

 

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