Poet mamas

I just finished reading It's a Boy: Women Writers on Raising Sons (2005, Seal Press). I really liked it. The title of the book tells you all you really need to know as far as what the book is "about." Most of the "women writers" in question, with the exception of Jodi Picoult, I had never heard of before. As it turns out, at least four of them are poets.

Ona Gritz, whose essay is, in part, about being a pacifist mother of a son who turns everything into a gun and, in part, about seeing so much of her ex-husband in her growing boy, has a lot of poems about being a mom, judging from what's available on her Web site and sites like Literary Mama.

Also along the lines of "I'm a pacifist but my son wants to shoot things" is the essay by Gayle Brandeis. She has a handful of poems you can read on her Web site as well.

According to her bio, Faulkner Fox is also a poet, but I couldn't find any of her poetry online. Her essay was about her family's "curse" of only ever giving birth to boys.

Gwendolen Gross wrote about her son's love of math and how she felt kind of outside that part of his world. I couldn't find any of her poems online, either but she, like Fox, seems focused on writing fiction now. However, they both mentioned writing poetry in their bios, so at least they're not ashamed of that part of their past.