The Unreliable Tree
Poems
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Northwestern University Press
Publishing:15th Sep '25
£13.99
This title is due to be published on 15th September, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
A luminous poetry collection that weaves together nature, family ties, and memory
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.
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
ISBN: 9780810148932
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: 454g
80 pages