Mother City

This collection of poetry explores violence and illness on both the personal and collective levels, and seeks to understand how these experiences can also offer new life and growth. Using the figure of a literal mother as a foundation for this exploration, the collection also moves through the "Mother City" of Cape Town, South Africa, as it confronts the nation's brutal apartheid history and the continued reverberations of such a system in present day. The poems are both elegies and acts of compassion for the deaths and suffering that make space for the births around us, constantly rising out of the new moment.