Author: Anne Stevenson

Cited by

• Francesca Segal (1)
  • IN: The Awkward Age (2017) Fiction, American
    EPIGRAPH: Why does a mother need a daughter? Heart's needle, hostage to fortune, freedom's end. Yet nothing's more perfect than that bleating, razor-shaped cry that delivers a mother to her baby. The bloodcord snaps that held their sphere together. The child, tiny and alone, creates the mother. A woman's life is her own until it is taken away by a first, particular cry. Then she is not alone but a part of the premises of everything there is: a time, a tribe, a war.
    FROM: "Poem for a Daughter", (1982), Poem, US/England