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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feeling it, she becomes an expert witness to her own trauma, pondering motherhood even as her daughterhood has been rescinded.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.

What readers are saying:

“Despite its designation as a collection of “Essays” it follows the logic of poetry: reasoning yields to resonance; tuning in to resonance startles and reorients our reason, and puns and associations and allusions, however heady, keep taking us back to the flesh, leaving us to squirm in it. So I’d say calling these poems “Essays” is both true and false. These are essays in Montaigne’s sense: attempts, trials, temptations. Attempts at something impossible: reconstituting an absent person as a thought; crafting something like a Frankenstein’s creature out of a collection of prickling, numb, or searing phantom limbs, translating a mother into an intellectual thing.”

“A beautiful, heartbreaking, intellectual, emotionally complex book of essays about mothers and daughters and relationships that end whether or not we want them to. Highly recommend! Each page is pure poetry.”

“Wow! A tour de force! A Mother is An Intellectual Thing pushes the frontier wide open in the essay poem hybrid (and makes you certain boundaries are not needed) with an unscripted, unbeatable, mind-opening intellectual foray, yet riven with musical threads that hold it tightly into movements in dialogue with one another. It’s sooooooo smart! and sharp! You can’t help but learn some new insight as KG digs in deep, questioning all that she has known and not known in a way that cracks open the other, pain, healing, love, and belonging that makes you want to notice your breathing differently.”

“‘A mother can dislocate you. No one tells you this, so I will do the telling,’ the book begins. It is vulnerable, beautiful, and heartbreaking.”

“I’m obsessed with this essay collection and the way Grey uses theory and poetry to investigate her experience of estrangement. It’s a feminist action, constantly obsessing over narrative and completeness and rarely delivering it. A subversive and inventive book!”

“A must-read for anyone who enjoys collections that defy disciplinary boundaries. These essays combine creative writing, theory, psychology, and mathematics to think through trauma–“a mother can teach you to count, to calculate her.” Relentless in both its rigor and vulnerability, this is book that refuses to flinch in the face of loss: “just as language moves us, we must move language.”