Manipulating Space-Time With Motherhood: Joanna Penn Cooper's What Is a Domicile

At Boston Review, a microreview of Durham-based poet Joanna Penn Cooper's first book, What Is a Domicile (Noctuary Press 2014)! If you seek innovative poetry that engages with motherhood, this is a must-read. Carlo Matos writes:

Joanna Penn Cooper has described her new book, What Is a Domicile, as being “about the first few years of a relationship . . . and then about pregnancy and early motherhood.” The collection is divided into three sections, with the title section proving the most complex and satisfying aesthetically. Its poems (mostly in prose) explore the spaces where the role of mother comes into contact with the role of poet, where the domestic and the artistic meet but do not, as one might expect, conflict. Cooper’s decision to present their interplay as synergistic instead of dichotomous is the collection’s great strength and joy; her focus is not on what is gained and lost when one brings new life into the world but on how pregnancy and motherhood manipulate space-time.

Find the rest of the piece at Boston Review.