MOTHER!
For anyone who has ever lost themselves and fought to come back.
MOTHER! is an unflinching exploration of womanhood, motherhood, and the lifelong evolution of identity. Through poetry and essays, Summer Stewart traces the emotional, physical, and psychic territories women navigate before, during, and after becoming a mother—and the ways these experiences reshape everything we thought we knew about ourselves.
This collection moves beyond the cultural scripts of motherhood to reveal the intimate layers beneath: grief, sexuality, lineage, rupture, reunion, and the quiet moments of self-recognition that redefine who we are allowed to be.
Stewart charts matrilineal struggles with precision and tenderness, confronting the ways families inherit silence, resilience, trauma, and love. Her poems ask hard questions about the shifting contours of self post-childbirth, while her essays tackle:
the double-edged blade of imposter syndrome
shattering professional and creative barriers
the distortions of parenting in the age of social media
and the fierce, feminist act of standing back—allowing a child to rise into themselves
MOTHER! is not a celebration of motherhood; it is an investigation.
It is a map back to the self—the self that existed before, during, and after.
Stewart writes with clarity, conflict, and unapologetic vulnerability. Her work resonates with anyone navigating identity, lineage, or the long, complicated work of becoming the person you needed when you were young.
This is a book about survival, reclamation, and the radical labor of mothering—ourselves most of all.
Praise for MOTHER!
The legacy of MOTHER! is that it allows me to witness female power in an entirely fresh way. It lets me truly inhabit another soul’s perspective…Summer’s understated intensity suffuses her unmistakable voice on every page.
—Anthony DiPietro, kiss & release
Summer Stewart’s Mother! is a box cutter, slashing societal binds that hold motherhood hostage. Refusing sentimentality, Stewart dismantles the assigned feminine roles that govern American domestic life (the endlessly giving mother, the emotionally managerial wife, the self-erasing daughter) and exposes the quiet violence embedded within them. Through a hybrid form of poetry and essays, she interrogates how women are trained to disappear inside family systems while still being expected to hold those systems together.
—Amy Baskin, Night Hag
In Mother!, Summer Stewart gives language, image, and voice to experiences shared by so many women. Finally, through the poems and essays in this collection, our experiences--both traumatic and seemingly mundane--are catalogued and recognized. Emotions and hardships we struggled to name are dissected and detailed in Stewart's clean prose and image-based poetry. She reveals the hidden tolls of partnership, parenthood, and adolescence, illustrating women's struggle for autonomy and individuality in the face of patriarchy, familial expectations, and religiosity. Reading this book made me feel less lonely.
—Darci Schummer, The Ballad of Two Sisters
Summer Stewart's MOTHER! is a ferocious, unapologetic, and creative expression, in poetry and prose, of a woman’s refusal to relinquish the immovable intention of her life—a life she invents herself, with talent, ambition, generosity and sheer will. It is a unique and beautiful literary project.
—Robert Crooke, Across the Endless Night
A brave, forthright, and insightful mix of genres! I enjoyed the close-up looks at parenting and parental influences. Wonderfully honest!
—Mick Bennett, Messes We Made
Summer Stewart’s new book, Mother!, is a hybrid collection of stories, essays and poetry that dives deep into the psyche to explore the architecture there with unflinching honesty and detail.
—Douglas Cole, The Gold Tooth in the Crooked Smile of God
A sharp and powerful reflection of womanhood, motherhood, and so much more. Even as someone who doesn't read much poetry or memoir, I LOVE this book. It doesn't pull punches as it proudly speaks truth.
—David Loring Nash, The Burntwood Anthology
At its heart, MOTHER! is less about offering neat conclusions and more about mapping the complexities of becoming and unbecoming as a woman, a mother, and an individual. Stewart’s candid, lyrical writing ensures that every reader—whether a parent or not—can find resonance in its exploration of resilience and self-reclamation. It is both intimate and universal, a testament to the power of women telling their own stories.
—Laney Wise
The stories from her past and her journey to find and understand herself are riveting, joyful, sometimes difficult.
—Shelagh Connor Shapiro