words toward Nadia Arioli’s ‘Mother Fur’, Fernwood Press 2025

Mother Fur, Nadia Arioli, Fernwood Press 2025
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“It is not enough to bear,” writes Nadia Arioli; “one must erase all evidence of having done so.” This book sheds light on what it costs to bring another person into being,and stands as a bold refusal to hide that cost. In deeply embodied writing, Arioli pits archetype against reality in order to illuminate the human and profoundly animal experience of motherhood. Arioli’s gift for word-on-word poetic friction builds a devastating heat that makes honesty inescapable. This writing demands we understand the exhaustion, tenderness, pain, and absurdity of birth and motherhood and the fact that each of us owes our existence to “life pulled from a wound.”

Lisa Huffaker, teaching artist in residence for the Writer’s Garret

Nadia Arioli’s Mother Fur is that rare commonality that is both an interrogation of crowded stillness and a confessional written in the ghost dark of movingly lonely observation. Spiritually tactile and physically worshipful of the exhaustion that invents fatigue, it is a verse that musics itself beyond the chorus of admittance and into the recalled invitation of a witness that acts as the inner life of the photo. A work of protection and parenthetical braveries, it is full of a draining care specific enough to parent emptiness in all its bullied and stray forms.

Barton Smock, author of Wasp, Gasp

Nadia Arioli’s Mother Fur is a wonder that begins and ends with tenderness-a new mother teaching her “son / to use / dandelions / instead of / flame,” a new mother coaxing a banished family cat into her lap to be loved. But Mother Fur is no Mary Cassatt painting of early motherhood, all “pink and green… a sacred circus.” It is instead a hardscrabble landscape-one of loss, the complexities of familial bonds, and the search for identity, all centered in the unlikely mythic figure of Grendel’s mother. Grendel’s mother, who lives and breathes and struggles in a sequence of fifteen astonishing poems that comprise Mother Fur’s fearless animal middle. Grendel’s mother considers, yes, many things from her inimitable vantage point, even the need

for “convalescing”-which she boards a Greyhound bus to accomplish. What a ride.

Robin Turner, author of bindweed & crow poison

To enter the gorgeous music of Mother Fur is to become one with lyrics that sing of a new birth, these songs resonating with the beautiful mystery of the rebirthing moments within our lives. A triumph of compassion and lyricism, Mother Fur unveils the growing truths that await us all.

Dwaine Rieves, author of When the Eye Forms and Shirtless Men Drink Free