Poet Lore and The Writer’s Center present a FREE virtual chat about the craft of poetry! We’re joined by Ananda Lima to discuss her acclaimed new poetry collection, Mother/land. Ananda is in conversation with Emily Holland, poet and Editor of Poet Lore, America’s oldest poetry magazine.
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We encourage you to order a copy of the book from your local, independent bookseller or online directly from the publisher.
Ananda Lima is the author of Mother/land and the chapbooks Amblyopia (Bull City Press, 2020), Translation (Paper Nautilus, 2019), and Tropicália (Newfound, 2021). Her work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, Poets.org, Kenyon Review Online, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere. She has an MA in Linguistics from UCLA and an MFA in Creative Writing in Fiction from Rutgers University, Newark.
About the Book
Mother/land is focused on the intersection of motherhood and immigration and its effects on a speaker’s relationship to place, others, and self. It investigates the mutual and compounding complications of these two shifts in identity while examining legacy, history, ancestry, land, home, and language. The collection is heavily focused on the latter, including formal experimentation with hybridity and polyvocality, combining English and Portuguese, interrogating translation, and transforming traditional repeating poetic forms. These poems from the perspective of an immigrant mother of an American child create a complex picture of the beauty, danger, and parental love the speaker finds and the legacy she brings to her reluctant new motherland.
“There is so much unbridled joy and pained tenderness in Ananda Lima’s poetry. […] Lima sings of the thrills and terrors of her new life in America, the pleasures of motherhood, and what she inherited from her family. Her voice is singular and wise and fresh.” —Cathy Park Hong, author of Minor Feelings