Mother/Land
​Ananda Lima

With tremendous experimentation in form, in Mother/Land, poet Ananda Lima grapples with the desolation of diaspora and how maternal love cannot always overcome the vast universe's apparent indifference.  

The collection is divided into three sections. The first part explores families stretched thin by migration, the Brazilian diaspora experience in the US, and the trepidation at assimilation. In "Vigil," Lima self-critically notes: "It took me four years / after having my son / to visit my mother in Brazil." In "Sitting by the Hudson," she also laments: "Rio was never home/until I got far enough / for home to expand into a whole country." 

Part II explores the creeping panoptic state prompted by (anti) immigration laws, but also expands its horizons to view the Earth as a planet and part of the universe beyond topographical nation-states. In "Ronald Reagan," a woman waits in line and goes through an X-ray machine and then is patted down before boarding a flight. The Moon is often personified and a regular presence, as in Eclipse when the author "imagined the moon / could see me, imagined I was / the moon seeing me / small, looking down." 

In all three parts, Lima bravely uses spacing and word placement in various poems to both create a pulsating rhythm and often a virtual representation of themes. In "Fall," about the poet recalling a mysterious epidemic that killed birds midflight many years ago, the word placement could easily be mistaken for a cloud of birds from the Hitchcock film. In "Ode to Wet Concrete," the landscape formatting and lines could easily be the mountains around Rio and upon which rests the Christ The Redeemer statue.

Mother/Land by Ananda Lima is a sparse, potent look at motherhood in the context of migration and the universe at large.

Ananda Lima is the winner of the Hudson Prize. She is also the author of the chapbooks Translation (Paper Nautilus, 2019, winner of the Vella Chapbook Prize), Amblyopia (Bull City Press – INCH series, 2020), and Tropicália (Newfound, 2021 winner of the Newfound Prose Prize). She has an MA in Linguistics from UCLA and an MFA in Creative Writing in Fiction from Rutgers University, Newark.

Mother/Land is a publication by Black Lawrence Press. Click here to purchase.
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Reviewed by
Elliott Turner​
​12/7/2021

Elliott Turner's fiction has appeared in Apogee Journal, Transect Mag, Vol. 1: Brooklyn, Azahares, Barren Magazine, & countless others. His debut novel, The Night of the Virgin, was an Int'l Latino Book Award finalist. He is a contributing editor at Latino Book Review and lives in Texas.

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