This Is a Story About Your Mother

In her latest collection, Louise Wallace raises an existential eyebrow at pregnancy-birth-motherhood. Is this universal rite-of-passage really an intimately personal event, down to the degree of fluid rising in your ankles, or is it a societal machine, forever churning out the next generation to an unrelenting voiceover of parenting advice? Wrestling auto-generated Huggies text and her own sometimes heart-breaking experiences into meaning, Wallace weighs the evidence. With equal parts curiosity and pique, she writes her way through to the human. 'Wallace's exquisite poems declare that women's lives matter (mothers or otherwise), and domestic and emotional labour matters because this unseen and undervalued work permits society to function. Few other poets capture the possibilities of domestic mess so well, and make me laugh at the same time.' -Sarah Jane Barnett