Each Bearing Out

In Rebecca Brock's chapbook, Each Bearing Out, children ask questions of time that none of us can answer. Here, the poet articulates every mother's fear: what will be lost in my hands, what will refuse to be carried? The love we harbor often moves us from one night to the next, one feeding to another. In the chaos of ever-turning days, Brock extends herself and those in arm's reach grace, remembering "I was learning/ there were terrible things/ to find a way to live with." The tenderness herein, woven from dailiness, shows us that no moment should be taken for granted; given time, we should use it to share what might save another. Joy is threaded herein in yellow ensembles, sign language, love of dogs and tigers, children made well. More than anything, these poems remind us, we are all trying to hold ourselves together, and in a certain light, we are worthy, illumined, fixed.

-Remica Bingham-Risher, author of Starlight & Error

Rebecca Brock's piercing, honest poems describe moments in the ordinary life of a mother that make vividly clear what we sometimes would rather not think about: the fragility of life, the pain of love.

-Alice Mattison, author of Conscience

The poems in Rebecca Brock's Each Bearing Out are filled with the domestic details of young motherhood, contextualized against the background of a vulnerable natural world. They address the breakability of people and things, both temporal and infinite: babies, cormorants, ice in a puddle, the light at day's close, bridges, shorelines, caged chickens, ill children. All come into focus as the mother in these poems observes the suffering and joys of her daily life. The speaker's existential anxiety over raising children amidst global environmental crisis becomes foremost in the book's central poem "The Mother Considers Solastalgia." She makes the equation between the precarious nature of her children's burgeoning selves and that of the fragile health of the globe they will inherit. In these poignantly beautiful poems, despite terrors both human and environmental, love and nature abide.