Review by Emily Pérez can be read in full HERE

EXCERPTS:

“Kimberly Grey’s collection of poetic hybrid essays A Mother Is an Intellectual Thing takes on a critical exploration of her own abandoning mother and the aftermath for Grey, her daughter. The more than fifty essays, each titled with an abstract noun ending in “-tion,” serve as lenses through which to explore grief and trauma, to make sense of the senseless. From “Dislocation” to “Disintegration,” from “Concatenation” to “Consolation”: the table of contents reads like stages of a long, psycho-mechanical process. The Latinate titles reinforce the idea of intellect. This is the language of science; there are stages; there is an order. While many of the titles are commonly used words like “Multiplication,” others, such as “Halation,” a photography term for the spreading of light in a halo effect, signal a specialized diction and a speaker whose knowledge covers disparate subjects. Ranging in length from one sentence to three pages, the essays indeed engage with a variety of critical sources, including poetry, philosophy, psychology, as well as literary, musical, and mathematical theory, citing thinkers from Roland Barthes to John Cage to Anne Carson to Sigmund Freud. Though she writes mostly in prose, Grey interweaves lineated and visual poetry and an occasional drawing. The collection is beautiful and unsettling. It requires rigorous attention and attempts to capture unruly emotional hurts within intellectual frames. Like a literary version of EMDR therapy, it tests language’s ability to reconstruct, redirect, and create a tunnel out of trauma.”

“While Grey cannot create sense of the time before abandonment, she demonstrates the effect of trauma on her psyche and body. She flirts with the idea of death, wishing she were a victim of the September 11th attacks, imagining death might garner her mother’s love. “I think I am one of those people who imagines a death I don’t want for a love I can’t have. A desperate exchange.” She researches how poets from Sappho to Vladimir Mayakovsky died by suicide, surmising that suicide would be “a chosen banishment, not imposed by the mother, but orchestrated by her: our collaboration of elimination.” What a mind-game! Even suicide, the ultimate act of self-ownership, would somehow be enacting the mother’s plan. While this twisty logic fortunately keeps Grey alive, it also exemplifies the profound depth at which her mother is embedded in Grey’s sense of free will. Grey diagrams how traumatic experiences move through the brain, keeping the body in a state of hypervigilance. She explains, “Trauma ravages the body. The spine becomes a stake in you. It holds you up, yes, but the nerves dotted up and down it burn like thousands of little fires.” She carries abandonment with her, even in sleep. Her trauma has also spoiled her other attachments to people, notably to the husband who is depicted through the book as “one foot out the door” and then gone after a twelve-year marriage. Grey laments: “Now that I am pain’s darling, now that I am pain’s darling (it echoes like a song I wish were not sung) no longer does anyone, not even a lover, look me straight in the face.” By severing the mother/child relationship, the mother has managed to sever Grey from everyone. But how much of the pain of exile comes from losing the actual mother, and how much from losing an idea of what a mother should be?” 

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