In the Mother Tongue

the long version

“Catherine Anderson’s <em>In the Mother Tongue</em>, another handsome book from Alice James, is…immediately accessible, bringing us a substantial speaker: warmly sympathetic, the persona moves outward toward the poor, the old, the disadvantaged, the ordinary, and toward animals…the warmth of that good speaker prevails, carrying the reader on to the next poem.” —<em>The Boston Globe</em> “In poems as variously fine as ‘A Body of Heart’ and ‘This Woman,’ Catherine Anderson is her own woman, a wonderfully original poet. Amid what sees as ‘the blunt confusion’ of every kind of life, her poems courageously validate what they claim: ‘Even out here I am human.'” –Philip Booth “Anderson’s best poems do more than sketch characters (immigrants, farmworkers…); they tell the stories of those whose mother tongue is drowning out in American society, particularly in our times, and they suggest how these stories and characters represent more than themselves, i.e., a political situation quite different from the middle class standard.” —Peter Oresick, <em>The Minnesota Review</em>