Poisonous If Eaten Raw

Alyda Faber

• Publisher: icehouse poetry
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781773101798
• eBook ISBN: 9781773102986
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

Shortlisted, J.M. Abraham Atlantic Poetry Award

In this experimental long poem sequence, Alyda Faber transforms the portrait poem into runic shapes, ice shelved, sculpted, louvered on a winter shoreline. Twenty years after her mother's death, Faber untethers herself from the mother she thinks she knows with wild analogies: depicting her mother variously as King Lear's Kent, a Camperdown elm, a black-capped chickadee, Neil Peart, Pope Innocent X, and a funnel spider.

While embodying the passionate relationship between mother and daughter, Faber's poems also expose the thorn in the flesh — the inability of mother and daughter to give each other what they most want to give. Endlessly discovered, yet ultimately unknowable, the poet's mother is complex, mystifying, and unwavering: courageous in her decision to leave all that she knew behind; bewildering in her fidelity to a damaging marriage; steadfast in her devotion to a God who is at once adamant and the source of ephemeral beauty.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Also by Alyda Faber
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Epigraphs
• Contents
• Portrait of My Mother as a Funnel Spider
• Portrait of My Mother as a Loon on Cranberry Lake
• Portrait of My Mother as Saint Felicitas
• Portrait of My Mother as Alex Lifeson
• Portrait of My Mother as Pope Innocent X
• Portrait of My Mother as a Vase of Sunflowers
• Portrait of My Mother on the Kitchen Window
• Portrait of My Mother with Clothesline
• Portrait of My Mother as a Field
• Portrait: Hidden
• Unasked Questions
• Portrait of My Mother Reading a Birthday Letter
• Portrait of My Mother Reading a New Year’s Letter
• Portrait of My Mother Looking at Eugène Jansson’s Hornsgatan by Night
• Portrait of My Mother on the Dance Floor
• Medieval House: Anger
• Portrait of My Mother as Diane Arbus Photographing a Boy in Central Park
• Portrait of My Mother in Vincent van Gogh’s The Garden of Saint-Paul Hospital
• Portrait of My Mother as a Pine Tree
• Woody Nightshade
• Vintage 1950s Feather Chignon Headband
• Portrait of My Mother as Dead-Lift Weight
• Portrait of My Mother in P.D. Eastman’s Are You My Mother?
• Portrait of My Mother as Franklin Carmichael’s Autumn Hillside
• Portrait of My Mother as a Black-Capped Chickadee
• Participant, Tronick’s “Still Face Experiment”
• Portrait of My Mother’s Fox Scream
• Cut against the Bias
• A History of Dolls
• Portrait of My Mother as Abstraction
• Portrait of My Mother as Walking Figures
• Early January Medieval Town
• A Town, Medieval, Built by the Mother
• Sheep, Again-Wolf
• Galleon
• In Her Kitchen
• Portrait of My Mother with Wolf
• Morning and Evening
• A Rough Measure
• Mimes
• On Brier Island
• Portrait of My Mother as Geddy Lee
• Marsh Marigolds
• Red Mackerel Tabby
• Portrait of My Mother as a Cow Being Beaten
• Camperdown Elm
• Portrait of My Mother as Two Hot Water Bottles
• Quinces
• Portrait of My Mother with Goats
• Self-Portrait as Great Blue Heron Feeding
• Distance
• A Town, Medieval, Built by the Mother: Summer
• Portrait of My Mother’s Prayers
• House Wren
• Portrait of My Mother as a Patch of Daisies
• Portrait of My Mother as Neil Peart
• Portrait of My Mother as Starling with Column
• Portrait of My Mother Looking at Untitled (Soft Monster in Angelic Landscape)
• Portrait of My Mother as a Red Kangaroo
• Portrait of My Mother as Michael Schumacher
• Her Hidden Life: Prayer
• Portrait of My Mother as the Duke of Kent
• Portrait of My Mother as the Palazzo Massimo Boxer at Rest
• Portrait of My Mother Picking Blackberries in Point Pleasant Park
• Self-Portrait as Joseph Beuys with Coyote
• Portrait of My Mother in Translation
• Hay Bales
• Portrait of My Mother on Almon Street
• Hide
• Portrait of My Mother as a Herd of Sheep
• Portrait of My Mother as a Moth on a Kitchen Window
• Notes
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author