A Mother Is an Intellectual Thing
Essays by Kimberly Grey

Ingenious out of necessity, these essays erupt from the exile of the author by her mother. In them, Kimberly Grey harnesses her formidable intellectual and creative resources in an effort to create coherence out of absolute dislocation. To do so, she calls on—beseeches—dozens of brilliant thinkers and artists (among them Etel Adnan, Roland Barthes, John Cage, Anna Freud, Mina Loy, Elaine Scarry, Gertrude Stein, and Simone Weil) to help her survive, if not fully comprehend, her banishment. By thinking her pain rather than feeling it, she becomes an expert witness to her own trauma, pondering motherhood even as her daughterhood has been rescinded. Synthesizing creative writing and theory, A Mother Is an Intellectual Thing is a powerful testament to the essay’s potential to help us persevere.

"In every page of this uncompromising, inventive book, Grey grabs hold of [...] the devastation of the unrecognized, unloved, and thereby invaded child—and shakes it, dissects it, studies it, and offers it up. What we learn from these pages is the power of language—searing, ingenious language—to remake the self word-by-word, to ‘reassemble’ an ‘I’ in the present tense." —Julie Carr

Kimberly Grey is the author of Systems for the Future of Feeling and The Opposite of Light, winner of the 2015 Lexi Rudnisky First Book Prize in Poetry. A former Wallace Stegner at Stanford University, she holds a PhD in creative writing from the University of Cincinnati and currently teaches at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

Original Trade Paperback / $17.00 (Can. $23.00) / ISBN 978-0-89255-575-8/ 152 pages / Essays