How does a contemporary woman with a career as a poet, professor, and editor experience motherhood with one small child, another soon to be born, and her own mother suddenly diagnosed with a brain tumor and Alzheimer\'s? The dichotomy between life as a mother and life as an artist and professional is a major theme in modern literature because often the two seem irreconcilable.
About the Author: Carmen Gim nez Smith is an assistant professor in the English department at New Mexico State University, the editor-in-chief of the literary journal Puerto del Sol , and the publisher of Noemi Press..
While Gim nez Smith incorporates universal experiences of motherhood that other authors have detailed throughout literature, what separates her book from these many others is that her reflections are captured in a style that establishes an intimacy and immediacy between author and reader through which we come to know the secret life of a mother and are made to question our own conception of what motherhood really means.
She wonders what her children will one day know about her own "secret life," meditates on the physical effects of pregnancy, and questions the myths about, nostalgia for, and glorification of motherhood.
Combining fragments of thought, daydreams, entries from notebooks both real and imaginary, and real-life experiences, Gim nez Smith interrogates Everything involved in becoming and being a mother for both the first and second times.
Gim nez Smith begins Bring Down the Little Birds by detailing the relationship with her own mother, from whom her own concept of motherhood originated, a conception the author continually reevaluates and questions over the course of the book.
Writing in fragmented yet coherent sections, the author shares with us her interior monologue, affording the reader a uniquely honest, insightful, and deeply personal glimpse into a woman\'s first and second journeys into motherhood.
In Bring Down the Little Birds , Carmen Gim nez Smith faces this seeming irreconcilability head-on, offering a powerful and necessary lyric memoir to shed light on the difficulties--and joys--of being a mother juggling work, art, raising children, pregnancy, and being a daughter to an ailing mother, and, perhaps most important, offering a rigorous and intensely imaginative contemplation on the concept of motherhood as such.
How does a contemporary woman with a career as a poet, professor, and editor experience motherhood with one small child, another soon to be born, and her own mother suddenly diagnosed with a brain tumor and Alzheimer\'s? The dichotomy between life as a mother and life as an artist and professional is a major theme in modern literature because often the two seem irreconcilable
