REVIEWS
WHAT THEY ARE SAYING ABOUT KIM'S
LATEST COLLECTION
"Beware Kim Dower’s poetry.
Again and again, this crafty writer invites you in for a
casual chat and then wallops you. Her poem “Game Over”
starts with a little comedy about squirting too much mustard
on her hotdog; next thing you know, she’s wrestling with the
existence of God. Her fantastic new collection, “I
Wore This Dress Today for You, Mom,” revolves around
quotidian details of domestic life – washing dishes, doing
laundry – but existential questions are always lurking
beneath the surface. Her most devastating poems are about
caring for a mother slipping into dementia. I read the
collection last month and had to put it aside. Coming back
to it this week, I’m wrung out all over again."
—Washington
Post
“Featuring gorgeous gems from
Dower's four poetry collections and new pieces energized by
the sheer power of her wit and irreverent style, "I Wore
This Dress Today for You, Mom" will make readers both groan
at and delight in recognition of the everyday absurdities
and magical moments that add up to a lifetime of
irreplaceable memories."
—Shelf-Awareness
"...Celebrating a colorful mosaic of mothering moments that
range from the spiritual to the practical, this poetry
collection also pays homage to the matriarchs in her life,
including her Russian grandmother, and their different
mothering styles.
Widely admired for her ability to texturize the everyday
with the sublime, Dower captures with poetic grace exquisite
remembrances of childhood and the special pains and
pleasures of mothering a child about to fly the nest. In "I
Lost My Mother in Bloomingdale's," the author tries on a
frilly bathing suit when she realizes with horror that her
mentally fragile mom has left the store without any ID or
money. The title poem, suffused with tenderness, touches
upon the core of a mother-daughter relationship and the
desire to please one's parent, while "There Will Be Things
You Do" relishes the inherited behaviors that are passed on
through generations. Dower explores female physicality with
a splendid ode to breasts, thanking them for their
companionship, and describes such mundane experiences as
getting a root canal and doing the dishes with vibrant
imagery."|
—Shelf Awareness
"Deftly constructed, inherently interesting, impressively
insightful, thoughtful and thought-provoking, and truly
memorable, poet Kim Dower's "I Wore This Dress Today for
You, Mom" is an especially and unreservedly recommended
addition to personal, community, college, and university
library Contemporary American Poetry collections."
—Midwest Book Review
“What
we inherit from our mothers, what we carry forward, what we never receive, and
what we choose to leave behind—Kim Dower’s poetry resonates with the echo of a
rich and complex mother-daughter relationship that she gently and carefully
unravels, line by line. This is a stunning collection from a poet whose wisdom
as a daughter and a mother shines through on every page.”
—Hope Edelman, author of Motherless Daughters
“In Chinese, the written character for “mother love” is composed of two
elements—”love” and “pain.” Kim Dower understands this universal concept in her
bones and captures its meaning in these beautiful and powerful poems.”
—Lisa See, New York Times bestselling author of The
Island of Sea Women
FIND OUT MORE ABOUT
"I WORE THIS TODAY DRESS FOR YOU, MOM"
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WHAT
THEY ARE SAYING ABOUT KIM'S WRITING
“A kind of miracle. . . wild with poetry’s particular fever . . . but, but,
sometimes—tempered by a rich inner life, fed by wisdom and knowledge one
gets walking up and down upon the earth with all of one’s senses fully alert. .
.
and this fever can turn into art, as it has, in poem after poem.”
—Thomas Lux
“Bold and sexy and smart.”
—Stephen Dunn
“Kim Dower’s poems
speak not of the highs and lows, but about the grey space between tragedy and
tenderness, memory and loss, fragility and perseverance – that space where the
soul and the truest self live.”
—Richard
Blanco
“Sensual and evocative . . . seamlessly combines humor and heartache.”
—Los Angeles Times
“Unexpected and sublime.”
—O Magazine
“A moving blend of sexual experimentation and loss.”
—Library Journal
“More Billy Collins than John Ashbery and has some of the same sharp Southern
California perspective as Joan Didion, driving down the freeway in The White
Album.”
—Oregonian
“Exquisitely crafted but the tool marks are invisible on the printed page, and
each
poem reads like an intimate conversation with the poet herself—bright and lucid,
funny and sharp, and always full of life.”
—Jonathan Kirsch, Jewish Journal
“A dark chocolate fever dream of love, of mothers. Kim Dower dares you into
the dark. You may find yourself lurking there.”
—Erica Jong
“Charming and compelling, accessible and profound.”
—Lisa See
“Jazzy, sassy, sexy—poems that move fast, are full of surprise and tweak the
heartstrings like Arkhipovsky tweaks the balalaika.”
—Stephen Dobyns
“Witty, sexy, irreverent, touching, and disarmingly candid. Attuned to life’s
quirky
and endearing strangeness, [Kim’s] poems are, you guessed it, fun.”
—Charles Harper Webb
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