The Unreliable Tree: Poems
Autor Margot Kahnen Limba Engleză Paperback – 15 sep 2025
Born from a state of fragmented time, the poems in The Unreliable Tree call out the intimate feelings mothers so often fear to share. With a precise and tender eye, Margot Kahn tracks her early years of parenthood alongside the seasons of her family’s orchard. As she chronicles the changes in her marriage, her friendships, and her own shifting identity, Kahn questions the risks we take for devotion and the labors we devote to love. These poems shine a light on the patience and perseverance required to care—for homes, for people, for heritage—and ultimately question the choices we make: to hold on to others around us, and to hold on to ourselves. Compassionate, unflinching, lyric, and raw, The Unreliable Tree portrays the world of early motherhood with humility and complicated beauty.
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9780810148932
ISBN-10: 0810148935
Pagini: 68
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 8 mm
Greutate: 0.14 kg
Editura: Northwestern University Press
Colecția Curbstone Books 2
ISBN-10: 0810148935
Pagini: 68
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 8 mm
Greutate: 0.14 kg
Editura: Northwestern University Press
Colecția Curbstone Books 2
Notă biografică
MARGOT KAHN is the author of the biography Horses That Buck and coeditor of two essay anthologies, This Is the Place and Wanting. Her poems have appeared in New England Review, The Kenyon Review, The Hopkins Review, and elsewhere. She lives in the Pacific Northwest with her family.
Cuprins
I.
Marrying
On a Spring Sunday, I Forget My Wedding Ring
Nordstrom Lingerie
Field of Vision
The World in My Phone & Out the Window
Accidental Hosts
Precaution
My Mother Could Always Wear Anything
Cold Creek
An Opening
Western Tanager
II.
Plum Season
Exile
A Quiet Day with the West on Fire
Fermata
Light in the Hand
Dinner
Electroencephalogram
The Cleaner
The Towels
Ode to Trichotillomania
Free Boat at the Corner of Kjargaard & Fisherman Bay
III.
Practice at the Community Courts
August
Mixed Feelings about My Contribution to Humanity
After a Mass Shooting
On the Bus Through Oregon
In Which I Excuse Freddy Mercury from P.E.
Rancho Bar
After a Winter Storm
If Someone Says Catalina
Walking to the End of the Road on the Last Day of July
IV.
Taking Advantage of a Summer’s Day
Morning Reverie
Wanting
In the Armor Court
Beforetimes
During the Pandemic, I Give You a Haircut
On Dissolution
Into the OR
Post-Op
Winter
Skiing
Acknowledgments
Marrying
On a Spring Sunday, I Forget My Wedding Ring
Nordstrom Lingerie
Field of Vision
The World in My Phone & Out the Window
Accidental Hosts
Precaution
My Mother Could Always Wear Anything
Cold Creek
An Opening
Western Tanager
II.
Plum Season
Exile
A Quiet Day with the West on Fire
Fermata
Light in the Hand
Dinner
Electroencephalogram
The Cleaner
The Towels
Ode to Trichotillomania
Free Boat at the Corner of Kjargaard & Fisherman Bay
III.
Practice at the Community Courts
August
Mixed Feelings about My Contribution to Humanity
After a Mass Shooting
On the Bus Through Oregon
In Which I Excuse Freddy Mercury from P.E.
Rancho Bar
After a Winter Storm
If Someone Says Catalina
Walking to the End of the Road on the Last Day of July
IV.
Taking Advantage of a Summer’s Day
Morning Reverie
Wanting
In the Armor Court
Beforetimes
During the Pandemic, I Give You a Haircut
On Dissolution
Into the OR
Post-Op
Winter
Skiing
Acknowledgments
Recenzii
“Radiant . . . The 42 poems of Margot Kahn's first collection contrast human loss and nature's abundance as they reflect on family history, illness, and disasters.” —Shelf Awareness, starred review
“Kahn speaks for our time, making full use of all the traditions of poetry, but the poems are the products of a completely unique sensibility. These poems are full of suggestion and mystery, full of strong music and vivid imagery; I have never read this kind of poetry before, and my life would be lesser if I never had.” —Laura Kasischke, author of Lightning Falls in Love
“Amidst blackberries, barns, bats, and low tides, at dead ends and ditches and traffic lights, Margot Kahn pays attention, asserts, ‘I like that I’m a woman who can still / be curious when she turns a corner.’ This is a controlled, compressed, lyrical collection of couplets and beautiful diction, of rhythmic syntax––a collection of body and time and the natural world. The Unreliable Tree also acknowledges a held history of the Holocaust, ancestors who survived, who created the legacy of this poet, who claims, ‘My whole life I’ve wanted // to be that girl––plated, chained, impenetrable. / To take the field first, to reveal myself later.’ You’ll want to read and reread these poems of motherhood and marriage, of desire and inquiry, poems that invite you to find ‘solution to dissolution: / alight in the places that will hold you. / Pass through darkness / with the swiftest grace.’ —Ellen Bass, author of Indigo
“At the beating heart of Margot Kahn’s The Unreliable Tree is the ghost of the Tree of Paradise—not the ubiquitous trash tree of suburban ditches, though one senses that Kahn would love that possibility, too—but the Old Testament tree of Eden, with its legacies of gendered agency, culpability, and desire. At every turn, this sensuous debut poetry collection subverts and recontextualizes this story of Eve’s first mouthful (“I like a place with history, / but of fruit in myth I disagree,” she writes), honoring her female speakers in all of their vexed and generative transformations of yearning, fulfillment, travail, and care.” —Lisa Russ Spaar, author of Madrigalia: New Selected Poems
“If you, too, have woken up somehow in midlife swamped by love and family life but also find yourself looking back fondly at the Corvettes and shag rug lawns and cheap body spray of your teenage loves, Margot Kahn's The Unreliable Tree is just the book you need. Wryly observed and finely honed, these poems conjure the reckless dangers of youth alongside the ordinary terrors and wonder of marriage and parenthood.” —Nancy Reddy, author of The Good Mother Myth
“Kahn speaks for our time, making full use of all the traditions of poetry, but the poems are the products of a completely unique sensibility. These poems are full of suggestion and mystery, full of strong music and vivid imagery; I have never read this kind of poetry before, and my life would be lesser if I never had.” —Laura Kasischke, author of Lightning Falls in Love
“Amidst blackberries, barns, bats, and low tides, at dead ends and ditches and traffic lights, Margot Kahn pays attention, asserts, ‘I like that I’m a woman who can still / be curious when she turns a corner.’ This is a controlled, compressed, lyrical collection of couplets and beautiful diction, of rhythmic syntax––a collection of body and time and the natural world. The Unreliable Tree also acknowledges a held history of the Holocaust, ancestors who survived, who created the legacy of this poet, who claims, ‘My whole life I’ve wanted // to be that girl––plated, chained, impenetrable. / To take the field first, to reveal myself later.’ You’ll want to read and reread these poems of motherhood and marriage, of desire and inquiry, poems that invite you to find ‘solution to dissolution: / alight in the places that will hold you. / Pass through darkness / with the swiftest grace.’ —Ellen Bass, author of Indigo
“At the beating heart of Margot Kahn’s The Unreliable Tree is the ghost of the Tree of Paradise—not the ubiquitous trash tree of suburban ditches, though one senses that Kahn would love that possibility, too—but the Old Testament tree of Eden, with its legacies of gendered agency, culpability, and desire. At every turn, this sensuous debut poetry collection subverts and recontextualizes this story of Eve’s first mouthful (“I like a place with history, / but of fruit in myth I disagree,” she writes), honoring her female speakers in all of their vexed and generative transformations of yearning, fulfillment, travail, and care.” —Lisa Russ Spaar, author of Madrigalia: New Selected Poems
“If you, too, have woken up somehow in midlife swamped by love and family life but also find yourself looking back fondly at the Corvettes and shag rug lawns and cheap body spray of your teenage loves, Margot Kahn's The Unreliable Tree is just the book you need. Wryly observed and finely honed, these poems conjure the reckless dangers of youth alongside the ordinary terrors and wonder of marriage and parenthood.” —Nancy Reddy, author of The Good Mother Myth
Descriere
A compassionate and sincere look at the trials of our relationships, woven through memory and nature, The Unreliable Tree plunges into the deep well of motherhood, matrimony, and the emotions that propel us through our lives.