Fruit Geode
“[Fruit Geode is] a book that I could not stop reading once I started, a book that drew me in with intimacy and force and then grabbed my heart hard, which is to say, if you have a body, this book is a must read.”
In Fruit Geode, the terrifying power of maternal love coexists with sorrow for the loss of one's younger self.
In lyrical, unflinching poems, Rabins investigates the passages of pregnancy, birth, and early infancy through a constellation of ancient and modern experience: Sumerian storm demons, astronauts, herbal medicine, Neanderthal DNA, mysticism, climate change.
In tracing the ritual mysteries of motherhood, Fruit Geode examines what it means to be transformed, to leave behind our certainties and walk into the unknown.
"I regard my former life / With a distant affection, / As an astronaut / Looks through a porthole / At the small green planet / Where she used to live," writes Rabins. Fruit Geode is a book about what it means to live in a human body, how love changes us, and what we pass on from one generation to the next.
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“Against the tide of received wisdoms about mothering and loving, one can only marvel at the personal cosmology Alicia Jo Rabins builds in these poems…Fruit Geode amounts to a kind of ritualistic reclaiming of the body and spirit as mother and artist in the presence of both her progeny and her ancestors who watch as she spirits herself into song again and again.”
