Mother Country

By Elana Bell

Mother Country examines the intricacies of mother–daughter relationships: what we inherit from our mothers, what we let go, what we hold, and what we pass on to our own children, both the visible and invisible.

As the speaker gradually loses the mother she has always known and upon whom she has always depended to early onset Parkinson’s disease and mental illness, she asks herself: “How do you deal with the grief of losing someone who is still living?” The caregiving of a child to her parent is further compounded by anxiety and depression, as well as the pain of a miscarriage and the struggle to conceive once more. Her journey comes full circle when the speaker gives birth to a son and discovers the gap between the myths of motherhood and a far more nuanced reality.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BOA Editions Ltd.
• Release date: Oct 6, 2020
• ISBN: 9781950774203

Elana Bell

Elana Bell is a poet, sound practitioner, and sacred creative. Her debut poetry collection, Eyes, Stones (Louisiana State University Press 2012), was selected by Fanny Howe as winner of the 2011 Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets. Her writing has appeared in Harvard Review, Massachusetts Review, AGNI, Barrow Street, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of grants and fellowships from the Jerome Foundation, the Edward Albee Foundation, the Brooklyn Arts Council, the AROHO Foundation, and the Drisha Institute. She was a finalist for the inaugural Freedom Plow Award for Poetry & Activism from Split This Rock, an award that recognizes and honors a poet who is doing innovative and transformative work at the intersection of poetry and social change. Elana leads creative writing workshops for women, seniors, educators and youths in Israel and Palestine, and throughout the five boroughs of New York City. She has taught her acclaimed Writing Toward Peace curriculum internationally with Seeds of Peace, the Tent of Nations, and Encounter, offering transformative creative writing workshops to support dialogue and peacebuilding for educators and community members from regions in conflict. Elana currently teaches poetry to actors at The Juilliard School, and sings with the Resistance Revival Chorus, a group of women activists and musicians committed to bringing joy and song to the resistance movement. She lives with her husband and son in Brooklyn.

Book preview

The Tapes

the wind is still the garden is the mind

where bulb lies low a snake disturbs the dirt

dark hearts and tongues exposed at the root

open all the same red silk flaps undone

red tulips bloom: little red heads

sometimes they quiet at the sound of rain

she calls them the tapes made of her

they come from her yet they are not her

no eyes no mouths can’t switch them off

they hiss & hiss into the night

thin magnetic strips ribboning her brain

The Good Years

Each child’s grief is unique. I would not trade mine for yours, would not trade the years my mother’s love fell on me like soft rain and I blossomed.

I remember the moment of that first heartbreak, when I crawled into my parents’ big bed, an island of love in the middle of their room. Low moans rolled from my mouth until no sound was left. Mother curled my body into hers and rocked to stop the shaking. You’re taking a mental health day, she said. Like that I was saved. I did not have to gloss, did not have to curl and spray and hide.

There she is: pulling roast chicken from the oven or sunning on our porch in her turquoise bikini, pen in hand, or gathering a circle of women in the wet grass to dance (and I, hidden in the