A Daughter's Work Is Heartless by Nature

A brave and evocative meditation on motherlove, which considers how we rebuild ourselves after loss.

Caledonia Kearns’ first collection of poems, published at 49, is an attempt to meet Muriel Rukeyser’s challenge, “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?/The world would split open”. Kearns’ poems tell the story of an ordinary woman raising a daughter as a second-generation single mother, as she recreates herself after marriage, negotiates lovers lost and found, and navigates the quotidian.

From Kearns’ childhood in Dorchester, Massachusetts (“the streets of that other city/were so quiet it was always a lonely dark”) to her daughter’s childhood during the first wave of gentrification in Brooklyn (“This is Brooklyn now./ The antenna factories across the street are long gone”), it is a deeply urban story.

Told in four parts, Kearns begins—“Coming from where I do/there was no choice but to bet on the filly.” She moves on to explore the reconstruction of the self after the end of a marriage and the search for connection. The collection ends with a reckoning—her daughter’s depression and hospitalization before she leaves for college: “I don’t want to say/sometimes my daughter wants to die/but if I don’t there’s no saving her/sometimes my daughter wants to die.” Along the way her daughter’s voice infuses the occasional commentary: “How you think/you fucked me up/is not how/you fucked me up.”

Clear-eyed and persistent, the virtue of “A Daughter’s Work Is Heartless by Nature” is its straightforward, accessible lyric, its relentless search for beauty in the day-to-day.