Teaching My Mother How To Give Birth |top| -

Her collection, Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth , published in 2011 by Mouthmark Press, is a chapbook of slim pages but heavy words. It tackles:

The teaching is not a lecture. It is a confession. It is a daughter kneeling before her mother and saying: I see the scar. I know why you never smiled during my birth. Let me hold your hand while we remove the stitches they put in your soul. Teaching My Mother How To Give Birth

The title poem is a masterclass in contradiction. How does a daughter teach her mother to give birth? The mother has already done the labor—both literal and figurative—of bringing life into the world. But Shire is not talking about biology. She is talking about reclamation. The poem opens with a daughter listing the things her mother does not know: her own pleasure, her own voice, her own right to say "no." Her collection, Teaching My Mother How to Give

When a daughter teaches her mother how to give birth, she is not replacing the past. She is excavating it. She is finding the girl inside the woman—the girl who was cut, who was married at 14, who was shipped across the ocean, who held a stillborn alone in a refugee tent. It is a daughter kneeling before her mother