Mother of Mother of

Emerging from Mónica Gomery's experiences as a queer female rabbi, the poems in this collection explore mothering through an ecological, political, and theological lens. “How should one love the world?” Mother of Mother of is a trowel, a shovel, or spade, turning the soil of this question again and again. At the crossroads of ecological precarity, political upheaval, and the possibility of motherhood, these poems imagine mothering not as a fixed identity but as an expansive practice of creation, stewardship, and devotion. The speaker mothers texts and prayers; mothers garden beds, houseplants, and loam; mothers and is mothered by the sustaining work of community care. Written on the porous border between poetry and faith, and drawing deeply from the author's rabbinic practice, Gomery's incantatory, soulful third collection recasts scriptural matriarchs and archetypes in new light while honoring queer love as sacred inheritance. “Every year I fight a little harder," the speaker confesses. "Every year the singing wins the war." Here, uncertainty blooms into a spiritual home: a fertile unknowing, a place from which to thrive and tend to the world.