Maximum Summer

The poems in Sylee Gore’s Maximum Summer, each placed in the middle of the page and framed by white space, record the passing of time in the months following the birth of the speaker’s first child. In a strong, lyrical voice, Gore delivers short, image-driven scenes that give an account of the speaker’s physical and emotional experiences as a new mother:

Colostrum lacquers my journal. Night is
golden morning. My pages fill with the
hours you don’t sleep. My body slumps.
A moment makes a day.

Gore’s background as a multimedia artist is evident in the rich, sensory details of these condensed, block-shaped poems that resemble photographs in which time stands still, unchanging:

Our neighbour holds the door,
budges his husky. Your eyelids wrinkle. Early
birds depart.

Pointing to her use of photographs to document her baby’s incremental growth, the speaker notes that “[p]hotographs don’t change, memories do.” The act of preserving specific moments in time—“I take a picture of you with / each of your visitors. Your face like water / absorbing light”—stands in contrast to the life that moves without pause outside of the frame: the changing of diapers, the nursing, the steady stream of advice. Amid all this, the speaker’s mother tenderly cares for both daughter and grandchild, underscoring intergenerational ties and cultural continuity:

My mother sprinkles asafoetida onto
scallions. She roasts chickpea flour in ghee,
seasoned with mastic. She sings another
lullaby before the airport bus departs.

As she learns to care for her baby, the speaker’s emotions alternate between wonder—“Your bulk earths me. I hum the words I don’t / remember”—and overwhelm—“My breasts leak. I swore to / greet change as inevitable beauty. You cry.” These lines beautifully capture how, for this speaker, mothering is more than the act of bringing new life into the world and caring for it. It’s also about birthing the self anew and about learning to live with the unexpected.