Bring Down the Little Birds: On Mothering, Art, Work, and Everything Else (Camino Del Sol)
A lyric memoir about motherhood, work, art, and caregiving, told in fragments that sharpen the book’s emotional clarity.
Work Information
Motherhood is more than a single role.
The memoir moves through pregnancy, work, illness, and family history in fragments that nevertheless build a coherent whole. It is intimate in voice but broadly resonant in theme.
Book Information
- Publisher
- Univ of Arizona Pr
- Published
- 2010-10-01
- Pages
- 95 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 15.24 x 1.27 x 22.86 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9780816528691
- ISBN-10
- 0816528691
- Price
- 3412 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Biographies & Memoirs/Specific Groups/Women
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. In Bring Down the Little Birds , Carmen Giménez 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. 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. Giménez 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. Combining fragments of thought, daydreams, entries from notebooks both real and imaginary, and real-life experiences, Giménez Smith interrogates everything involved in becoming and being a mother for both the first and second times. 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. While Giménez 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.
Carmen Giménez 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.
Reviews
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I really enjoyed reading this book. It is a magical rendering of a mother's journey. I recommend it highly.
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Carmen Gimenez Smith's Bring Down Little Birds was a fabulous read. I loved the style of the staccato'ed lines that show the frenetic pace of being a mother, an expectant mother and a daughter who must at points mother her mother while craving the security felt by a young child on a mother's lap. So many lines rang true to my own experience. Thank you, Carmen for putting it all so beautifully wrapped in your book!
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I really loved this book and it's take on motherhood. Carmen Gimenez Smith provides a touching account of her journey having her son and what it meants to be a daughter, wife, mother, and woman. She articulates the struggles of juggling all roles. She is a strong woman, and reading this book was a real glimpse into what it means to be a mother.
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The books was advertised as "Like New" but there were markings and writing all over the pages and words of the book. So deceptive and books with extensive and intrusive margin notes should not be up for re-selling--completely ruins the experience of encountering the author's words.