MOTHERLOVER
Ginger Ko

PRAISE FOR MOTHERLOVER

“Thick weight we feel for, bowl of poison & chicken feed we do also tip to our lips, gob of fused gold ingots we cough up in the river with the snow falling one etched flake at a time and if a calliope plays, it’s not the tune you were expecting. The top of the head a tin toy wound, the body flavor-sodden. Motherlover‘s hilaria & cool-eyed righteousness, effortless abyss skimmer, cradle of heartless & heartbreaking turns. Here is a degradation as rich in wry indignation as any of us pukes could hope for.” —Danielle Pafunda

“In Motherlover many selves speak: sister, lover, mother, stranger. All speak, though, from one ‘body bearing up under puzzlement,’ and they speak, not pretending to hear ‘angels in the music of a difficult landscape,’ but with more imposing purport: to ‘weird the grayscale quality of my life.’ Ginger Ko’s poetry epitomizes poetry’s purchase, its capacity to contest the pervasive forces of grayness, of uniformity and conformity. Motherlover is formidable, a fierce weirding.” —H. L. Hix

“Ginger Ko’s Motherlover is a gut-wrenching and memorable debut, gorgeous in its renderings of discomfort and precise in its sensitivity. Ko slips expertly from density to emotionality, from repulsion to compassion. Her verses are ‘razor-wire flowers to punish / those taking what isn’t theirs.’ This is a book of giving, taking, and remembering, an exploration of memory’s insistence, power, and slipperiness. The poems feel for something with their hands, as if in the dark, sliding around in the beautiful mess of language and personal history. The exploration is terrifying, felt, real, funny, and just a goddamn pleasure.” —Morgan Parker

“Ginger Ko’s Motherlover is at once supplication and rebuff. I’ve been going back again and again to the book for its moments of airtight agony, unsparing in their demands. Despite everything: Motherlover doesn’t want your sympathy. Motherlover doesn’t want your disdain. Motherlover doesn’t want your loyalty, even. It only wants you to let it alone, sit back down, and think about the errors of your ways. —Fanzine, Grace Shuyi Liew