Mouths Open to Name Her: Poems (Barataria Poetry) - Softcover

“Anne Sexton, Sharon Olds, Katie Bickham: three generations related by poetic temperament, which runs thicker than blood. All three write with raw honesty about women’s embodied lives, but only Bickham―equally skilled at lyric and narrative―pushes the boundaries of her range beyond the self to the world.”―Julie Kane

“What a wrenching and beautiful book is Mouths Open to Name Her, Katie Bickham’s collection of poems about women, especially mothers, throughout history and around the world. She writes about war, and God, and torture, and slavery, forced sterilizations, medical experimentations, all the ills that female flesh is heir to. She writes about sex, and joy, and the love of a mother for her daughter, whom she saves from genital mutilation (‘Serengeti District, Tanzania, 2017’). And she writes about courage, including the courage of a woman in a remote Mexican village who performs an unanesthetized Caesarean on herself, determined not to lose yet another child―and survives. So finally this is a praise book. Praise for the female principle―the goddess evoked by the volume’s title, who’s never visible but everywhere named. And praise for life itself, the ‘Good News’ of birth continuing, ‘just like this, just as imperfectly, / no matter what, / tomorrow.’”―Ann Fisher-Wirth