Poisonous If Eaten Raw

"In this experimental long poem sequence, Alyda Faber transforms the portrait poem into runic shapes, ice shelved, sculpted, louvered on a winter shoreline. Twenty years after her mothers death, Faber untethers herself from the mother she thinks she knows with wild analogies: depicting her mother variously as King Lears Kent, a Camperdown elm, a black-capped chickadee, Neil Peart, Pope Innocent X, and a funnel spider. While embodying the passionate relationship between mother and daughter, Fabers poems also expose the thorn in the flesh, the inability of mother and daughter to give each other what they most want to give. Endlessly discovered, yet ultimately unknowable, the poets mother is complex, mystifying, and unwavering: courageous in her decision to leave all that she knew behind; bewildering in her fidelity to a damaging marriage; steadfast in her devotion to a God who is at once adamant and the source of ephemeral beauty."--