Mothers

Rachel Zucker is the author of THE PEDESTRIANS (Wave Books, 2014), MOTHERS (Counterpath, 2013), and MUSEUM OF ACCIDENTS (Wave Books, 2009), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is also the author of The Bad Wife Handbook (Wesleyan University, 2007), The Last Clear Narrative (Wesleyan University, 2004), Eating in the Underworld (Wesleyan University, 2003), and Annunciation (The Center for Book Arts, 2002), as well as the co-editor (with Arielle Greenberg) of Starting Today: 100 Poems for Obama's First 100 Days and Women Poets on Mentorship: Efforts and Affections (both from the University of Iowa Press). She is co-author (also with Arielle Greenberg) of HOME/BIRTH: A POEMIC (1913 Press, 2010), a nonfiction book about birth, friendship, and feminism. A graduate of Yale and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Zucker teaches at NYU and the 92nd Street Y. She currently lives in NYC with her husband and three sons and was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship in 2012.

Literary Nonfiction. "MOTHERs is a howling storm of a book. In this desperately digressive essay, the poet Rachel Zucker narrates her complicated path to becoming and not becoming her mother, the storyteller Diane Wolkstein. Zucker turns her intelligent eye outward and inward, including everything she knows about mothers, stories, poems, and consequence itself. In mythic terms, the essay is about a poet who doesn't want to turn into a storyteller. But as in all myths of avoidance, Zucker must eventually tell a terrifyingly inevitable story."--Sarah Manguso