Mammal - (Steel Toe Books Poetry Award) by Ana María Caballero (Paperback)

About the Book

MAMMAL's lush, multivalent verse lifts the veil off romanticized motherhood, challenging the notion that sacrifice is a virtue and giving voice to what is left unsaid in that all important space of home.

Book Synopsis

MAMMAL probes how the inescapable rhythms of our physicality govern our emotional hungers. We like to view ourselves as in control, but the reality is that desires we don't quite understand determine how we relate to ourselves, our partners, our children, our parents. Even metaphysical, spiritual quests are launched from the plane of the sensorial, which hinges on our animalistic need for survival. Intimate relationships, too, are at the mercy of our inborn-and often opposing-longings for both emotional stability and adventure, generating subtle layers of conflict with others that we have difficulty comprehending. Mammal sings from deep within these layers.

The book is organized into three sections, each prefaced with a quote by authors whose voices are crucial to the text-Sharon Olds, Anne Carson and Elena Ferrante. Within each section, poems, lineated and prose poems are used to explore different facets of motherhood, pregnancy, and the body, without prescribing to obvious reproductive patterns. Rather, the book exists in a state of atemporality. Several of the poems are titled Week XX and feature a different number from one to forty, suggesting the gestational process, but these poems are dispersed through the manuscript outside of the established numerical order. They appear to signal our disordered, disheveled selves.

The tension between physicality and selfhood, between biological processes and their cultural implications, and between ecology and the storylines we construct to explain (and thus attempt to contain) it are plumbed in MAMMAL's pages. No entity can claim credit for the way our bodies work, and as such any attempt to brandish the body as a weapon is baseless. Embodied experience is murky ground, at once the root and lofty branch of consciousness, but if we are to disassemble the narratives that are used against us, we must first dare to name them-without romanticism or preciousness.

MAMMAL lifts the veil off romanticized motherhood to challenge the notion that sacrifice is a virtue. Its lush, multivalent verse gives voice to what is left unsaid in that all important space of the home.

Review Quotes

"It is a rare poet for whom the first comparison that comes to my mind is Anne Carson. Yes, that Anne Carson. But Mammal is a book of such rigorous thinking, rigorous language, and rigorous thinking-about-language, that it merits the highest praise. Another name I would throw into the conversation is Elena Ferrante, since this is an unflinchingly honest book about motherhood, the body, marriage and its discontents, whose narrator, by the final poem, has assumed a novelistic depth of character. By any standard it's a remarkable first book, which reminds us that in poetry, as in life, great challenges yield great rewards."

-Campbell McGrath

"Ana María Caballero's Mammal contemplates the woman as body, the body as wonderous babymaker, while also acknowledging the loss of self as the self makes another. In her case, the body that creates life is the same body that creates exquisite poems. The speaker situates herself in a lineage of mothers and daughters, complex family matters. But she also situates herself as mammal-our developed brains, our ability to feed our young with milk. She explores the science of family making-c-sections, a "nipple stone," wands and gels, and a wrenching poem "Vasectomy"-spoiler alert, the man in the poem doesn't get one. Instead, we have a fearless, profound speaker who acknowledges hard truths: "no one is lonelier than the woman who is loved." This is an ingeniously forthright poetry debut!"

-Denise Duhamel

"The intense and electric poems in Ana María Caballero's MAMMAL deftly circumnavigate a conduit of embodied experience. In linguistically rich poems that shapeshift through a wide panorama of formal possibilities, Caballero smoothly glides along the spectrum between animal and human, instinct and intellect, nature and nurture, motherhood and otherhood. MAMMAL addresses biological and linguistic production and reproduction, and in this volume, Caballero considers sex, procreation, parenting, partnership, and kinship with nuance, verve, and insight. These brilliant and vibrant poems traverse the paradox of the human urge to categorize, separate, and name with the seamless biological interrelations of umbilical cord and breast milk-allowing a universe of complexities to coexist within the fiercely tender ecosystem of this book."

-Lee Ann Roripaugh, Author of Tsunami vs. the Fukushima 50