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