Who I'm Reading

 

Rita Dove was born  in Akron Ohio in 1952. She attended  Miami University of Ohio, University of Iowa held a Fulbright scholarship at the Universität Tübingen in Germany. She served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1993 to 1995. She has many honors under her belt, among them is the 1987 Pulitzer Prize in poetry, the 1996 Heinz Award in the Arts and Humanities and the 2006 Common Wealth Award. In 1996 President Bill Clinton bestowed upon her the National Humanities Medal.

The Book

Mother Love

 Is a book of poems published in 1996, that centers around the dynamics between mother and daughter's relationships and their universal struggles to co-exist.
 

Used

The conspiracy's to make us thin.
Size threes are all the rage,
and skirts ballooning above
twinkling knees are every man-child's
preadolescent dream.
Tabla rasa. No slate's that clean--

We've earned the navels sunk in
grief when the last child emptied us
of their brief interior light.
Our muscles say
We have been used.

Have you ever tried silk sheets?
I did, persuaded by postnatal dread
and a Macy's clerk to bargain
for more zip.

We couldn't hang on, slipped to
the floor and by morning the quilts
had slid off, too. Enough of guilt--
It's hard work staying cool.

Written by Rita Dove