We are thrilled that the Poetry Book Society has chosen Gail McConnell’s pamphlet Fothermather from IS&T Press as one of the six books in their FATHER’S DAY GIFT GUIDE along with Six (Zaffar Kunial), My father (Eduardo Moga), Noctuary (Niall Campbell), Unknown Soldier (Seni Seneviratne) and Candlestick Press’s Ten Poems About Gardens. Details on the Poetry Book Society web site here.
With a playfully genderqueer title containing both ‘father’ and ‘mother’, Fothermather explores love, language and forms of attachment beyond biology. Bobbing in its sea, we find the seahorse: the curious queer creature who patterns the pages. Playful, political and inquisitive, these poems chart the experience of IVF, pregnancy and parenthood for a family taking shape in Northern Ireland.
You can find Gail’s ‘Untitled/Villanelle’, which we featured on Father’s Day in 2020, here and her poem ‘An Apple Seed’ on our archive site. Her first full collection ‘The Sun is Open’ (Penned in the Margins) which ‘pieces through a boxed archive of public and private materials related to the life and death’ of her own father will be published in September.