Taking the Long Way Home

"We don't need a new mother," declares a bereft, eight-year-old, after devastating loss. Into this postwar, Philadelphia family enters a German-born "second mother"-with memories of searching "the ravaged henhouse / for eggs missed by starving soldiers." The evolving relationship between child and step-mother upends stereotypes and re-configures, with compassion and wisdom, the mother-daughter paradigm. By the book's close, as roles reverse, all move through "rooms stenciled now with absence." This book-length narrative sequence makes a unique contribution to poems of family and how we rebuild them.

Robin Becker, author of The Black Bear Inside Me

It cannot be easy to lose one mother, let alone two. Mary Rohrer-Dann shows us how to lose a second mother gradually to dementia gracefully. Elegiac poems sweep up the entire twentieth-century-war, poverty, cruelties-with the spunk of a woman who loves life and her children "with her riven, immigrant's heart." Sharp observations, imagination, and empathy animate a world in these poems, which resonate with beauty and wisdom.

Julia Spicher Kasdorf, author of Shale Play: Poems and Photographs from the Fracking Fields

With the intense distillation of poetry but the expanse of memoir, these poems span the speaker's earliest memories of her mother and her death when the speaker is a young girl, to her relationship with her father and her growing relationship with her father's second wife. Through witnessing this "second mother's" life, from her difficult migration from Germany to the United States to descent into Alzheimer's disease, Rohrer-Dann paints a moving portrait of survival, resilience, and ultimately boundless love. These poems achieve so much of their resonance through the poet's eye for image, finely rendered observations, and exquisitely drawn details. Throughout Rohrer-Dann's attention to beauty, in her language and in the world of family she evokes, reminds us of the connection between loss and hope.

Shara McCallum, author of Madwoman