Overview

Grasp This Salt is a collection of poetry that seeks to explore what it means to be a mother and the complexities of trying to understand our own mother's experience of mothering us, while following the life and trial of Susan Smith, convicted in 1995 for the murder of her two young sons. Nestled inside the sins of a woman who would kill her own children is the voice of a young mother grieving multiple miscarriages while her toddler named Erin keeps playing at drowning. The young mother is haunted by Smith's crime as it's recounted by a flock of lake birds, Medea of Greek mythology, and the imagined black man Smith claimed kidnapped her children before she was found guilty. Grasp This Salt brings to light with startling urgency what it means to love another, to grieve violent death, and to bear a lifetime of guilt.

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9781635349191

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Reviews

Who are we to one another? Erin Kae's insistent, unsettling poems find ways to listen, to imagine and care, where most of us would pass by unthinking, would make a monster of a person. An unforgettable new voice has arrived. Lytton Smith, author of My Radar Data Knows Its Thing (Foundlings Press, 2018) What does it mean to try to understand our own mother's experience of mothering us? Or to try to understand another mother's experience of mothering? Erin Kae's unflinching debut imagines what it means to be a tourist in the city of a mother's unimaginable decisions. Through a cycle of sharply wrought elegies, Kae investigates the complexity of motherhood through the closed car windows of the Susan Smith trials. The poems deftly refract Smith's voice through time--before mothering, in the act of mothering, in the act of watching or not watching, in the moment of inventing the black man she blames (whose own voice rises to the surface of the lake through Cornelius Eady's rendering of this racism). Nestled inside Smith's crime is the voice of a mother of a toddler named Erin who keeps playing at drowning, alongside a Greek choir at the trial ready to let us in on the sins of a woman who would kill her own children. The poems in Grasp This Salt are beautiful and frightening, unafraid to grasp at miscarriage, murder, and whether we can make sense of violent death--to look behind the curtains left open for neighbors to know there is nothing to see here. Through intricate form Kae's collection never loses sight of the ways the public might want a mother to suffer for her decisions, but she also knows that only the Lake Birds Observing Brutal Imagination know best, who comes and goes from the lake. These are fierce lyrics of violence and of mothering. Cori A. Winrock, author of Little Envelope of Earth Conditions (Alice James, forthcoming)

Author Information

Erin Kae's poetry has been featured in Vinyl, Sonora Review, Crab Fat Magazine, Fugue, and elsewhere. She was recently nominated for the Pushcart Prize by Aster(ix) Journal, and was selected as a finalist for the 2017 Locked Horn Press Publication Prize for their Read: Water anthology. She currently resides outside Boston, MA, where she splits her time writing poetry and children's literature.

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