Raw motherhood made public
Ana Maria Caballero’s latest poetry book “MAMMAL: Sacrifice Is Not A Virtue” refuses to accept what she sees as the beautification of motherhood, instead stripping the maternal role into its more base, animalistic roots. In this way she finds much more antagonistic feelings towards the act of creation while still redefining motherhood on her own terms.
To achieve this naked reflection on motherhood, Caballero relies on scientific jargon and a healthy dose of experimentation. There is recognition of how evolution has even brought us to this understanding of motherhood, and of how other animals like lizards and birds never are as physically connected to their young as mammalian mothers are.
But in “MAMMAL,” we take this idea even further: No other group of animals has to be severed from their child like mammals do. In the poem “Week Four: Nativity,” Caballero writes: “Initially conjoined, I was cut free upon first breath / alive. An entire lifetime spent nursing / such self-determined slicing.”
In this collection there are no celebrations of motherhood without caveats. Families aren’t spared without reflection. Instead, the raw effort and private strain of the speaker’s grappling with family life is made public, pushing readers to question the weight of the pedestal we’ve placed on mothers.
Her poetry refuses to sit still, often evolving its structure stanza by stanza. This gives Caballero’s work an element of unexpectedness: A poem will have varied form within itself and oftentimes reinforces the moment-tomoment tone of her poems. Lines will shift like sand, eventually pile up at the margin, then explode into the white space of the page. Any white space can and will be used to achieve the poem’s ends, and in this way the poems similarly feel like a clawing towards understanding the space they’re occupying.
Throughout all of this virtue-stripping is still the value of the home and family. But to get there, “MAMMAL’s” speakers go through more lamentation than praise. Negatives are reflected in the children, and the same is true in reverse.
She also examines the separated nature between mother and writer. Her speakers inhabit these two worlds and understand that there’s not much good that can come from integrating the two. In this way, we find moments that the writer within the speaker finds
By Ana Maria Caballero Steel Toe Books ($18)
funny, beautiful, mesmerizing — but harmful for the mother and difficult to navigate.
This isn’t a collection looking to provide an answer or a solution to this dichotomy, but rather to reveal it as another struggle that feels unique to Caballero’s speakers. Ultimately, there is a desire to categorize moments and aspects of the speakers, to create discrete aspects and allow them to work independently of one another, that is in constant conflict with the families they take care of. In that lack of fulfillment comes much friction and longing, which often comes out as an intense anger or sorrow.
Caballero’s choice of language is also critical to “MAMMAL.” She uses scientific theory and terminology to create poems that feel cold, clinical. These poems don’t want to explore the humanity of childbearing and birth, but rather the mammalness and all that this evolutionary path has both given and denied us.
In the poem “Vasectomy (An Incision In Parts),” Caballero compounds the structure of a sectional poem with the scientific method, turning the conversation about vasectomies into an investigation of how little responsibility is asked of male caregivers within a family. The language choices distance the reader, but also allow the reader to observe a poem from a different angle than the typical lyrical language does.
“MAMMAL” is a fresh and energetic take on the concepts of motherhood and child rearing. It examines, identifies, categorizes, all while showing the brutality of its reality.