I have become the common myth. Mother. The sleepy hum of early memories. The smell of shampoo, of Olay, of lavender. The feeling of safety. The absence of fear.

When poet Alice Kinsella becomes a mother, she finds herself utterly lost. As she searches for answers to the question of her new identity, she considers the mothers and writers who came before her. In her inimitable poetic style, Kinsella takes pregnancy and the first nine months of motherhood and forms from them a broken prism through which to view both a woman’s place in the world, and her child’s in the future we’re creating.