Andrea Potos
Mystery to Me 1863 Monroe St., Madison, Wisconsin 53711
press release: Think of a mother cupping a child’s face in her hands, and you have the shell of Mothershell, Andrea Potos’ tender and luminous new collection. Yes, these are poems of loss: her mother’s cancer and treatments, her death and the grief that follows, but these are also poems that celebrate the chord, “the unseen thread” that binds mothers and daughters forever. Potos imagines heaven as an eternal breakfast, mother and daughter drinking our coffee/black and filled to the top. Coffee without bitterness or sweet / but somewhere in the perfection / of the middle. Here are poems that celebrate the power of presence, poems of travel: Ireland, France, Italy, ekphrastic poems that illuminate paintings. In “What the Poem Did,” Potos writes It became a spine/walked me upright/ into the day, and this is what this book does, walks with each of us and sustains us in the long journey of all of our ordinary days.