Mother Lines

Mother Lines travels the complex and layered terrain of motherhood. Shawna Ervin's first chapbook includes poems about motherhood, adoption, autism, and parenting after trauma. Ervin generously invites readers into her experiences by offering the tender moments at bedtime, the pain of watching a child struggle with autism, and the ways her own loss becomes sharper as she loves her children with the type of love she longed for as a child. Ervin uses both explores motherhood with traditional forms of poetry and free verse. The poems in Mother Lines follow Ervin's children from their first days in their new family as babies to the beginnings of puberty and imagining the day her children are ready to set off on their own.