A Swooping, Longing, Reaching for a Mother by Nancy Lynée Woo

lithopaedion
by Carrie Nassif
Finishing Line Press
pp. 34

Carrie Nassif’s lithopaedion births itself through moody, atmospheric, earthy language as the speaker traverses a country landscape in search of an absent mother. “Lithopaedion” means “stone baby” from its origins in Greek, and it describes a rare occurrence when a fetus becomes calcified inside the mother’s body after a failed ectopic or abdominal pregnancy. In the author’s note, Nassif lets us know that this is an apt metaphor for a parentified child. Parentification is when a child is expected to provide emotional support for a parent, instead of the other way around.

The mother-daughter relationship is the core that binds this book together against a rustic backdrop. The collection starts off with the speaker, trowel in hand, trying to “unbury” the mother, wanting to hoard her “clenched tooth smile and pin curls” like “overripe plums.” We encounter “black walnut rinds” as a metaphor for the mother’s injuries, placing us in a surreal dreamscape, readying us for the journey ahead.

It is a journey of memory, absence, and healing. In the title poem, we are shown a lineage of disempowered “stone mothers” whose daughters reside within the mother’s body “too deep for a blackened needle.” We feel the pain of being reduced to “gravel to be expelled.” The lithopaedion conceit is precise and consistent, showing us how trauma can render us stunted, stationary, small—as if stuck in time. It is this motionlessness that the speaker travels through as she tries to understand the origin of the mother’s brokenness in a vast, rural landscape of “dead fields” where we hear a “yellow horse bellowing for its mother.”

The speaker wishes to be the moon’s daughter instead. The pain of losing the mother is apparent in lines like “how it must have felt for you to bleed out / to hear your pulse slow.” The speaker wishes for a mother who doesn’t let her daughters “fall away unnoticed.” Grief emerges in beautifully rendered fragments like “she is a memory of gleaming / rising from the moss-softened / from her own rotted earth,” placing us viscerally in the body and the dirt. The strength of this collection resides in its relentless delivery of exquisite image after exquisite image, heartbreaking with its yearning for a mother who will never return, a “swooping reach through black space.”

But in these pages is also a sense of strength and the ability to overcome and move on. The speaker reveals she is a mother herself, and she shows us the love and acceptance she has for her genderfluid child who was born a daughter. We understand the closeness between them in scenes where she and her grown child “spend the sunset at the park by Big Creek” among the “soft-wooded matriarchs” and “slumbering cottonwoods.” The hazy, melancholy tone of this collection is ultimately deeply tender.

There is also the tumultuous feeling of trauma recovery in these pages. The speaker imagines herself and her sister as “lustrous gold,” a result of their own mining, their own pluck and grit. Coins and trinkets pour onto them, as if saying there are spiritual rewards for doing the work of healing. We are renewed when we encounter the “giddy rush of room to grow / from tending inner space.” New worlds open in lush scenes where “angels drop from the sky every day.”

Though the speaker can never know a mother who was never there, she can know herself, and she can know her own life, embracing “the steady static of acceptance.” Just like how a child without a mother might try to stitch together pieces of understanding, the fragments and images woven through these pages reach for something elusive, but it is in the reaching back that the speaker is able to move forward. This is a stunning collection of pensive poems that needs to be read, reread, and savored.

Nancy Lynée Woo is a poet, organizer, and climate activist. Her debut poetry collection is I’d Rather Be Lightning. Nancy has received fellowships from Artists at Work, PEN America, Arts Council for Long Beach, and Idyllwild Writers Week. She has an MFA from Antioch University.