Tender Hooks: Poems [Paperback]

Beth Ann Fennelly (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 17, 2005

A fearless delineation of the joys, absorptions, and—yes—jealousies of new motherhood.

Beth Ann Fennelly is fearless in delineating the joys, absorptions, and—yes—jealousies of new motherhood. Having studied motherhood "as if for an exam," reality proved "wilder and deeper and funnier" than anything she'd anticipated.Tender Hooks is Fennelly's spirited exploration of parenting, with all its contradictions and complexities.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The pun of the collection's title probes a predominating theme: the messy, sometimes angry and frequently euphoric terrain of new motherhood. The first poem, "Bite Me," displays Fennelly's characteristic earthy brashness: "finally I burst at the seams/ and you were out/ Look, Ha, you didn't kill me after all/ Monster I have you." Like Plath minus the lyricism or Sharon Olds minus the sweet aftertaste, Fennelly doesn't flinch from showing the darker side of mothering, not just the can't-see-straight exhaustion and the anxiety of new parenthood, but the fury of both infant and mother: "No one ever mentioned she's out for blood. I wince/ as she tugs milk from ducts all the way to my armpits." The wrath is marched in equal doses by evidence of primal, physical love: "I whispered in her see-through ear/ I'd keep her safe forever-/ I, her first lover." The two middle sections of the collection include poems of place, parents, love, followed by a long, meandering poem that juxtaposes the Bible, miscarriage, teaching writing and the new baby. The book's last section returns to the (stronger) material of parenting and ends on an intentionally mixed note: responding to a commonsensical voice that says infancy, like the pangs of childhood, eventually fade into memory, Fennelly's speaker declares, "Fine, I say, not meaning it. I'll have another."
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

From Booklist

Move over, Sharon Olds, and make way, Denise Duhamel! Fennelly is a southern poet who writes of her own female experience as carnally, or, perhaps, incarnationally, as either of those northerners. If she is not as harrowing as Olds, whose reports of interfamilial violence can be hair-raising, or as hilarious as Duhamel, who seems frequently to have no shame, she is hardly reticent. Formally, she favors single poems and sequences longer than two pages, she seldom rhymes or constructs metered stanzas, her sense of where to break a line is as good as the late Denise Levertov's, she writes striking epigrams (e.g., "First Day at Daycare": "My daughter comes home smelling like / another woman's perfume"), and she often proceeds directly from the title into the body of a poem, as if the title were the first line. She writes primarily about the birth and infancy-to-toddlerhood of her daughter, secondarily about the loss of a previous daughter to miscarriage. She puts the physical realities of the mother-child bond--the touches, smells, sounds, and phenomena--into her poems with an ease that overrides queasiness (still, many men may blanch at her frank detail), relaying the experience of motherhood, including the emotional pain of miscarriage, more convincingly and intimately than any other poet who comes to mind. This is awesome, humanely humbling poetry. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 128 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; First Edition edition (May 17, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393326853
• ISBN-13: 978-0393326857
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.6 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (21 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #528,272 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars HOOKED!, May 7, 2004

By 

S. Thompson (New York, NY) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Tender Hooks: Poems (Paperback)

I avidly read poetry once, and for a long time, but I eventually grew tired of what I saw was a trend toward precious lessons on lexicon rather than on life. Beth Ann Fennelly is different. There is geniune experience underlying the pages of TENDER HOOKS, and experience-bred passion, and wit, and bravery, and evident love. The best of Fennelly is on par with the best of Wilbur and Larkin and Bishop and Frost, and I'm thinking especially of her baby poems, especially the first two. They leave me breathless on every read.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Lovely, amazing, smart, funny, sad., April 9, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Tender Hooks: Poems (Paperback)

I don't read that much poetry, but this book took my breath away. I bought it because Lucinda Williams has a quote on the back, and now I'm an even bigger fan of hers. Ms. Fennelly writes poems that are both clear and strange, poems I "got," poems I'll read over and over and over and over. I'll say this, too: Her daughter and husband are fortunate. Buy this book for your mother for Mother's Day, and for your father for Father's Day. I hope one of those book clubs picks it up, because it's mostly women who read those recommended books, and this is a book women will love. Of course, men will too--I'm proof of that.

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Keenly intelligent , insightful and witty poems, May 27, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Tender Hooks: Poems (Paperback)

Ms. Fennelly's work represents everything I want from poetry. It touches my mind with immediate recognition and my soul with its' genius and my heart with aches of pleasure and pain in the mutually shared experiences of life.

Her images are succinct, apt, and, frequently, very funny. And, on top of it all, I can understand everything she's talking about.