And Yet: Poems
Daylight Savings Time ends today. It is a post-industrial era gift each fall: the 25-hour day. I sneak into my children’s rooms, attempting to silently turn the clocks back before my daughters rouse to face a bonus hour of could-be (should-be) sleep. “It is actually 6:45, not 7:45, sweetheart. You can go back to sleep if you like.” My eight-year-old responds with wide-eyed bewilderment before silently returning to her bed to revel in the cozy warmth of sleep-warm blankets on a cold morning. The entire concept of Daylight Savings Time holds the mirror up to the surreal constructed nature that is time; a reality which many cannot observe for long, lest their worldviews full of hour-based schedules and busyness seem unnecessary, contrived, unreal in some way. And yet, every November we graciously (or reluctantly?) take that added hour (oddly borrowed from a day last spring). We parents pray the hour swap from spring to autumn does not disrupt our children’s inner clocks overmuch. Meanwhile, I pour my first cup of coffee even earlier this morning, as my body didn’t seem to get the memo that it was 4:56am not 5:56 when I arose.
It is precisely these sorts of modern mothering moments, among other aspects of 21st-century womanhood, that inspire the poetry of Kate Baer. And Yet: Poems (2022) is her second full-length book of poetry, and it goes on sale on November 8. As with her first collection, What Kind of Woman (2020), which became and instant number one New York Times bestseller, And Yet scrutinizes what it is to be a white, American, middle class woman at this moment. Middle age, parenting, marriage, self-image, sex, health: all of these have their moments under the bright lights that are Baer’s poems.
Baer’s poems embody today’s maternal womanhood in fierce, stirring ways. From the book’s dedication (“for the ones who feel like home”) to the two epigraphs with which this slender volume of poetry opens, Baer balances the moving with the cutting, always in pursuit of the real: “To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope” (Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet); and “Making bank, shaking hands, driving 80 / Trying to get home just to feed the baby” (The Highwaywomen, “Redesigning Women”). The one hundred poems included in And Yet do not shy away from the anxieties and traumas (childbirth? postpartum, anyone?) of modern motherhood, but they also invite joy, honesty, vibrancy.
Baer and I, I believe, are of the same generation, hovering in our early forties. Like everyone our age (with children), we look out at the future of aging children, maturing marriage, and declining physical strength. We reflect on several decades of adulthood that we have already lived: our twenties, our thirties. Like so many of us Xennials (those of us born as Gen X morphed into Millennial classifications: the late 1970s and early 80s), Baer reports on the inner life of a modern-day woman with an honesty that may arouse discomfort in some, that may lead others to purse their lips together and mutter something about distasteful poetry, but that generally I welcome and applaud. Even those poems with which I did not relate, I appreciate because I know they will find value in the lives of another woman’s experience.
As winter holiday gift-giving approaches, I suggest considering gifts of poetry this season. And Yet is an ideal gift for any mother of my generation who embraces conversations about life’s beauty but also its struggle. Baer’s wild success with the publication of What Kind of Woman demonstrates her ability to strike a chord among her peers; And Yet continues to prove her ability to reflect lived experience in clever, poignant poetry.
Thank you to Harper Perennial for sending me this advanced review copy.
Bibliography:
Baer, Kate. And Yet. Harper Perennial: 2022.
