Available March 2007 ISBN 10: 1-55380-046-X ISBN 13: 978-1-55380-046-0 6 x 9 130 pp trade paper $14.95 CDN $12.95 US Poetry

After reading this collection, you will never look at mothers — at the playground, at the elementary school, or across the kitchen table — in quite the same way again. Beginning with a poem of pregnancy, written by her twenty-five year old self, Arnott leads us through a span of twenty years of inward- and outward-facing struggles, centred firmly in the ongoing work of becoming a mother. Living on the thresholds between races — the poet is a prairie-born Métis — and between the generations, Arnott articulates the challenges of mothering in heart, body, and mind. Her work involves sometimes abstract, sometimes visceral long and short poems, song and chant. Through visiting and revisiting pregnancy, childbirth, lullabies, and multi-generational rage, the poetry moves from the desperation of survival through to a tender place of clarity. The sexual, the spiritual, and the sociological weave together here to shock, cajole, and ultimately to transform our picture of the inner life of the mother.

"Like babies, these poems spring from the womb. Arnott draws us into the healing circle of her words, with urgent beauty, in tune with the temper of our times." —Susan Musgrave

Joanne Arnott, a Metis/mixed blood writer, was born in Winnipeg, and has lived a cumulative thirty years in Musqueam traditional territories on the west coast. Mother to six children ranging in age from three to twenty years, Joanne has been a literary performer and publishing poet since the mid-1980s. She worked for many years as an Unlearning Racism facilitator, and continues to incorporate social justice perspectives and peer counselling approaches in her work. Her first book, Wiles of Girlhood (Press Gang, 1991), won the Gerald Lampert Award. She has since published four additional books. These include poetry, a children’s illustrated story and a nonfiction collection. Her most recent book is Steepy Mountain: love poetry (Kegedonce Press, 2004). She lives with her husband and children in Richmond, BC.