RECURRENT
by Darla Mottram
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Pub Date May 24 2024 | Archive Date Jun 15 2024
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Description
What if the connection, at the root of our existence, is in fact a connection and a severance? How does a sense of self form in relation to connections that hold within them such intensive ruptures and slides? How might one redefine family in such a way that severance can live with, not against, the formation of emotional connection? Darla Mottram's extraordinary first book of poems-RECURRENT-explores these questions with such generosity and vulnerability. Verse, snapshots with lyric captions, documents (letters, notations from medical records, reports of Children's Services Division), poems in prose, poems as visual fields, dreams, memories, anaphoras, among so much more-this livid variety along with the book's length brings to mind pillowy poetry books by Bernadette Mayer and Alice Notley. In RECURRENT, the speakers come to find themselves-through neglect and abandonment, passage through the foster system, and then extended-family adoption-seeking connection and autonomous selves-hood. By the book's end, the reader will come to understand that "recurrence" is the rhythm of life we must not only accept but immerse ourselves in. RECURRENT is a truly brilliant first book and signals amazing things to come from Mottram.
-Jay Ponteri, author of Someone Told Me and Wedlocked
In RECURRENT, Darla Mottram tells a story of familial abandonment, addiction, sexual abuse, violence, loss, and generational influence through her lyrical poetry, a handful of black-and-white family photographs, notes from foster-care workers, and the full text of a letter that Mottram, age seven, wrote to her mother, "whereabouts unknown, which was never delivered." Calling RECURRENT a story is imprecise, but suggests the book's central struggles with time, loss, and meaning-making. Mottram explicitly resists many of the tropes associated with mourning, maintaining that I want to / honor / what's broken / no: silver linings, phoenix rising / from ashes, lemons turned lemonade / no recovery narrative / the poem fails / to make understandable / what isn't-I don't want to fix it / I just want to hold it. This book grabbed me: out of trauma and loneliness, Mottram has created a work of insight, beauty, and humanity.
-Michele Glazer, author of Fretwork and On Tact, and the Made Up World
I don't want to fix it / I just want to hold it, Darla Mottram writes in RECURRENT. If a person can do this, can offer the materials of their life to us, in this way (photographs, reports, documents, poems, dreams, nightmares, truths ... no end or beginning to the list), if it can be held and not fixed (as it was never broken or in need of fixing), then what? I read this book and sit back in awe at this question, living in the room with me.
-Emily Kendal Frey, author of Lovability and Sorrow Arrow
Advance Praise
Darla Mottram's stunning debut is a visceral living map through the fraught, fragmented terrain of early childhood. This is not an account of healing or wholeness ("no: recovery narrative") but a sacred act of steadfast witness, bearing forth "a song not wanting to be/ sung, but a song, nevertheless." Mottram peers into the voids that memory and abandonment leave behind, "into / the eyes of the thing swallowing you." From the enigmatic gaze of her infant self staring at something glimmering out of the frame of a photograph to harrowing fragments of caseworker accounts, letters, and legal documents, every detail serves as a haunted signpost in Mottram's quest to make contact with her origins - a feral genesis tale whose rifts and lacunae make wholeness obsolete. Here ghosts aren't exorcised or embraced, but etched in the living mirror of the poet, where the self's own body bears their likeness ("... it is difficult to tell where my mother ends & I begin"). Gothic and haunting, the poetry turns in on itself recursively, edges bleed between world and self. RECURRENT is a bold but not unflinching text - in fact, it trembles - live, shimmering ouroboros of a book that brings us always back to the unanswered question of how we begin.
-Stephanie Adams-Santos, author of Dream of Xibalba and Swarm Queen's Crown
In RECURRENT, Darla Mottram brushes family history against the grain, using exquisitely crafted poetic texts to question, amplify, expose, undermine, and redeem a documentary and archival chronicle of abandonments and temporary retrievals. In the process, she actively exhibits why it is only poetry, through its own peculiar linguistic and formal deviances, that can even try to resuscitate the life-worlds and the lived realities of those people, including herself, whose shades flicker around the edges of bureaucratic reports, photographs, letters, and fragmentary memories, "like something's glimmering / out there / beyond documentation..." Mottram juxtaposes the documents themselves with searing poems that are hyper-alert to the different claims of literal and emotional "truths" which different kinds of pictorial and textual representation lay claim to. From the beginning the reader is implicated in an absolutely necessary recurrent questing and questioning that will unravel the received comfortable meanings of words like "family", "mother", "love", "loss", "past", "self". And as much as it is Mottram's deeply and uniquely personal self-excavation that is the driving energy of this book, you cannot come away from it without sensing your own biography or biographical fictions becoming complicated and troubled. And you realize that Darla Mottram may have given you an incredible, perhaps life-altering gift out of her own pain: "the freedom to continue carrying forth // what can't be abandoned"
-Ger Killeen, author of JuárOz and Blood Orbits
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