The Balance
Mary Kovaleski Byrnes
The Balance examines motherhood and the fragility of love in today’s uncertain, volatile America. Moving between received forms and narrative verses, these poems trouble the heart of parenting’s untranslatable reality in an age of chaos. The poems also consider where mothers might put our much-demanded attention and asks to whom we might listen, undercutting advice to strive for balance from online influencer culture. Instead, in a sequence that mourns the loss and appropriation of Ukrainian culture and personal ancestry—and creates a form out of the image of the nesting dolls—the speaker seeks out the voices and misplaced knowledge of the mothers inside mothers who’ve taught us how to mother; similarly in a crown of sonnets addressed to the speaker’s children and anchoring the middle section of the book, the speaker considers the balance of a mother’s life, asking how we might, caught in the terrible loops of violence and war, still “make our small plans.” The poems seek perhaps not balance or order in chaos, but a measure of joy, and a good deal of hope.
About the Author
Mary Kovaleski Byrnes teaches writing and literature at Emerson College, where she is the Director of the Writing Studies Program. Her debut poetry collection, So Long the Sky, was published by Platypus Press in 2018. Poems have also appeared in journals and anthologies, including Guernica, Salamander, the Four Way Review, the Boston Globe, Best of Kore Press, Best of the Net, and elsewhere. She co-founded the EmersonWRITES Program, a free creative writing program for Boston area youth, and is a senior reader for Ploughshares. Her pedagogical interests and projects include connecting the study of creativity and writing composition, international student writing, and community writing, as well as lyric possibilities between poetry and song writing.
