Author Description

In this second collection of poetry, Backhand Through The Mother, poet Renee Norman, picks up several thematic threads from her first book, True Confessions (Inanna Publications, 2005), and weaves them into poems about mothering, aging and loss set amongst the cultural traditions of family and Judaism. Relationships between mothers and daughters are celebrated, deconstructed, and mourned, as the poems resonate with the slippage of time and the emptiness of hands once full and busy. From babyhood to adolescence to young adulthood, Norman writes about the poignancy of motherhood, set against her own aging and the illness, death, and widowhood of aging parents. She also writes hopefully and with some humour as she navigates her daughters' growing pains, middle-age, her Jewish background, and the legacies our parents leave us.