I'm an American-born child of an immigrant, so while my experience is somewhat opposite to the narrator of this collection, I still found it was something I could connect with strongly. This is a collection of hard-hitting yet accessible poetry that weaves together themes of immigration, identity and motherhood in a unique way. There's a heavy emphasis on language, which rang true to me as it's often a point of contention and disconnect between immigrant parents and children.

This one was not for me.
Thank you NetGalley for providing a copy of this ARC in exchange for an honest review!

My thanks to the publisher for providing me with a copy of this book to review. This was a beautiful collection, mostly focused on themes of family and immigration. It is a stunning collection, very moving, and obviously deeply personal.

3.5 stars

Heartfelt poems about the immigrant experience. Beautiful, musical language in free verse form. Several of the poems are bilingual, English and Portuguese.

[What I liked:]

•The language is very musical and fluid, accented and syncopated. You can really tell how much music & rhythm has influenced this poet’s writing, & it is so striking and wonderful to experience.

•These poems are full of life, of beauty and joy & sorrow & family. They touch on missing home, on finding a place of safety, on navigating the familiar & unfamiliar. They are authentic & have much to say.


[What I didn’t like as much:]

•Many of the poems have significant sections of text in Portuguese. While I could still enjoy and appreciate reading (trying to!) the words aloud for the rhythm & sound, I couldn’t understand a lot of the content since I don’t speak Portuguese. This made the collection in some ways inaccessible to me, & limited my ability to engage with the poems fully.

[I received an ARC ebook copy from NetGalley in exchange for my honest review. Thank you for the book!]

Muchas gracias Netgalley por el envío de una copia avanzada a cambio de una reseña honesta.

Este poemario tiene unas raices muy arraigadas a la naturaleza, la esencia del ser humano y de uno mismo en cuanto a la cultura.

Si bien, los temas que abordaba eran muy interesantes, a mí particularmente no logró encantarme. La lectura me resultaba pesada por momentos y no me transmitía el sentimiento que esperaba encontrar entre sus páginas.

poetry is such a powerful source of literature.
Ananda Lima tackles topics of motherhood while also talking about being an immigrant in America very nicely.
Thank you Netgalley and Black Lawrence Press for the e-copy.

I really enjoyed this book and appreciates Lima's unique writing style. I think some of these poems would be great for students to analyze in high schools!

Thank you to Books Go Social and NetGalley for the Advanced Reader's Copy!

Now available.

Eloquent and elusive, Ananda Lima's Mother/Land is a meditation on motherhood, motherland and Mother tongue. Flowing effortlessly between Portuguese and English, the book takes place in a liminal space between Brazil and America. As a new Mother myself, I deeply related to Lima's worries of not being rooted in either culture enough & how that would impact her parenting. A great debut collection!

A wonderful collection of poetry, easy to read and very likeable. A good start in the genre, browsing different subject from the hardest to the funniest.

One for the coffee table.

Not the performative coffee table that things go to die in dusty, display hell, but the one where you put books you want to wear out and hope your guests will too.

I appreciate the language, the representation, the spirit of migrants past and aspiring hopefuls. The exploration of the home we choose to let our dreams rise in the east of and our realities set west in.

I’ve read this once and I already know I’m going to have to come back to NetGalley to update this review as I find new meanings in each independent page of the collection.

Christmas stocking definite. I might also have to add this to the books I buy for new moms. Thank you!

This debut poetry collection follows an immigrant mother of an American child. These poems question what it means to be an immigrant and a mother, what defines motherland, the role of language, and how they clash and transform over time and place. Although Brazilian Portuguese appears throughout the collection, it did not hinder my reading flow. Lima's notes at the end of the collection also contextualize Brazilian cultural references, news, texts, and other media that a poem used, referred to, or responded to. Above all else, Lima’s poetry collection takes great care to not simply reduce the speaker as a mother or to her immigrant identity. This thought-provoking collection is a great addition to the growing number of works by Brazilian authors (including those residing in the United States and other countries).

I think the author did a good job at telling a story with her poems
I really liked the use of Portuguese in her poems and although I do not speak Portuguese, it added another dimension of realness to the poems.

3.5 stars

Thank you to BooksGoSocial for providing an arc in exchange for an honest review.

Mother/land is a beautiful poetry collection exploring the interplay between motherhood and immigration, commenting on legacy, ancestry, belonging, and the distinction between a place and a home.

The imagery is gorgeous, but while I could see how well-selected each word was, I engage with the poems emotionally. This was vastly improved in the second act, which included some favourites such as PB&J and What I think about when I think about gravitational waves.

The collection builds to a crescendo with ‘Mother Tongue’ which is raw, vivid, and vulnerable. The third act continues in the same fashion with Cleaning the Colonial, When they come for us on the 7th train, and Bee. The order of each poem was very well organised and built an incredibly cohesive arc throughout the collection of seeking a different life, being excluded from the American dream you were sold, the relief of watching your children be accepted but losing the part of them that ties them to your ancestors, and grappling with motherhood in a harsh world that threatens the protection of childhood. Thee blend of English and Portuguese further supported this in the most stunning way.

MOTHER/LAND by poet Ananda Lima is a beautiful exploration of motherhood and the migrant experience through English and, sometimes, Spanish. Lima uses two languages to construct a deeply moving narrative about the hardship of being a parent in a hostile land you aren't sure you belong to despite laws, borders, and blood.

An interesting dissection of language and identity within the context of life as an immigrant mother. The success of poetry depends almost entirely on whether you click with the poet’s style, and that’s a wholly subjective thing. So while I have no specific complaints about this collection, per se, it hasn’t become a new favourite either. That said, there are a few gems to be found, and those who see their own experiences reflected in Lima’s will likely find it a considerably more powerful read.

Thank you to the publisher for a free advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.

A really beautiful collection of poems. Some of them were perhaps a little abstract and hard to follow, which isn't usually a problem in poetry, seeing as it's not a narrative form, but I found that some of them were trying to tell me a story I couldn't quite grasp; perhaps that's the point, as our life experiences are so different. Lima's language is absolutely wonderful, though, at once elegaic and euphoric, and her use of both Portuguese and English in the same poems is a really interesting way of weaving together the dual facets of her identity. I would recommend reading this one slowly.

Heartfelt and honest, Ananda Lima’s debut poetry collection Mother/land is at once a song of motherhood, a lament for home, and a meditation on the immigrant struggle to find true belonging in the U.S. As an immigrant from Brazil and parent of an American-born son, Lima uses her poems to reflect on both grief over her personal experiences and the fierce, self-sacrificial love for her child that brought her through those difficulties.
In Mother/land, an interest in divisions and multiplicity permeates both form and content — a focus that is perhaps best illustrated in the stylistic rendition of the title itself. Lima’s simple slash symbol explodes the word “motherland” into several layers of encounters with grief. Thematically, Lima grapples with a series of dualities: past and present, Brazil as her homeland and America as her new land, identities as an immigrant and mother. Her poems construct a smooth, moving interplay between autobiography, national history, and anticipation of the future for her son.
While many poems explore the tensions between immigrant identities, I was also especially interested in the way Lima weaves together different kinds of language — Portuguese, biblical language, dialogue associated with settings ranging from airport security checkpoints to architecture tours. In “Seven American Sentences,” Lima uses language from the Genesis creation story in conjunction with shameful aspects of the United States’s human rights record, coolly drawing attention to the discrepancy between proclaimed American ideals and the reality of injustice.
Beyond detailing Lima’s modern-day experiences with feeling “other” in the U.S., Mother/land draws extensively on American history as part of Lima’s internal wrestling with the reality of the U.S. as her new country, far removed both geographically and socially from her motherland. In “Cleaning the Colonial,” Lima repurposes the language of colonialism when addressing her house, almost like a reclamation of that act of possession: “I occupy your hollow rooms and populate them with private song.” She also confronts the reality that, despite the immigrant’s enduring struggle for a sense of belonging, the once independent strands of history between herself and the foreign country she moved to have since become inextricable:

By now we understand
you don’t really belong
to me
and I don’t really belong
but we have come to accept
that our histories have commingled

Lima compellingly evokes the complexity of the immigrant experience by portraying blurred and unclear divisions. In “monday between [[impeachment or [something]] and the end of the world],” we visualize the lack of an audible distinction between words:

I can’t
tell the difference
morning | mourning
luto | luto…
perfume | perfume

One element that most powerfully distinguishes Mother/land from other immigrant narratives to me is the collection’s resounding musicality. Repetitions of similar-sounding Portuguese words drive poems like “every moon,” which read like chants or songs that are at once artful and unrestrained, metered and intense, brimming with emotion and soul. Similarly, in the collection’s final poem, “Berimbau,” the infusions of Portuguese add a musical quality as rhythmic and percussive as the “beat of running” and the “meat and bones cracking / dirt” that the poem describes, culminating in a rapturous ending:

Bimba Toque de luna we
follow o compaço de aço o compaço do passo
o compaço da culpa do
Sol

Meanwhile, “Translation” and “Moving Sale” experiment ambitiously with form, re-imagining the structures of the sestina and the pantoum by replacing moments of pure repetition with Portuguese translations. Additionally, though I was initially skeptical of Lima’s enjambment choices, I came to appreciate how her collection-wide style of short broken lines seems to evoke the effort it takes to learn and speak English as a second language (with her own language itself remaining ever graceful and poignant):

I
was afraid for him
speaking anything other
than the unofficial
official language
of this land
which is not my land
despite the claims
it makes in song
I gave in
and spoke to him
in my broken
version of his
language

Since the U.S. fails to live up to its ideals as described in songs — the land of the free, a country that welcomes all and celebrates diversity — Lima writes her own poems into song. Whether immigrants ourselves or not, Mother/land can speak to the many of us who have grappled with existing in a national context that puts up barriers on so many fronts, from language to physical movement. Lima’s collection resounds with both incantations in her mother tongue and with English refrains that burn blue with longing, with the search for home.

dnf

I wanted to like this one after reading all the fantastic reviews, but unfortunately I felt myself losing interest with every poem.

book given in exchange for an honest review

This collection of poetry is very different than I have ever read before. However, the language that it is written in was absolutely breathtaking. I felt as if I was right there with the narrator in their home country and going through each situation side by side with them. I highly recommend this poetry collection to anybody!

This is a solid collection from Ananda Lima, exploring life as a mother and immigrant to the US from Brazil. The mix of English and Portuguese was nicely done. Some of the poems - PB&J, Mother Tongue, and Toast to America - are particular standouts. Thanks to Black Lawrence Press for making a digital ARC available through NetGalley..