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Praise for Protection
“Michelle Lerner’s debut chapbook Protection is a breathtaking poetic journey of pregnancy and motherhood. I love Lerner’s luminous imagery that fuses at times with an unexpected searing irony. There is an originality of subject matter and candor dealing with exploring the gender identity of children that reinforces this author’s openness and intelligence. Her poem “House” may be the fiercest and most tender poem about pregnancy I’ve ever read. Michelle Lerner is a new shimmering star on our poetry planet.”
– Laura Boss, author of The Best Lover, and editor of Lips
“Protection explores the relationship between parents and their unborn child and traces it to the child’s development as a separate human being with the freedom to choose an identity. These are beautiful lyric narratives that touch the heart.”
– Maria Mazziotti Gillan, poet, American book award winner, and editor of the Paterson Literary Review
“The title poem in Michelle Lerner’s lovely and nuanced chapbook, Protection, speaks of teasing out ‘the definition from destruction/ the stumble from the fall.’ This theme of the necessary danger of experience is central in these bold poems on parenting and its discoveries. Searching from within the personal and the wider world the poems create a vivid and moving portrait of a life in our moment, written with vulnerability, insight, and a keen eye for fresh, revealing detail.”
– Jennifer Michael Hecht, Ph.D., author of Who Said (Copper Canyon)
I am your tin house,
your cabin, your tent
and like a tiny nomad you travel with your yurt
on your back, wrapping around you
as you writhe like a bronco, bucking at the walls
my blood just the whisper
of wind as you stretch.
You do not know yet to be lonely
you do not know
what it means
to wait.
I am a house of spirits,
yours and mine.
You hiccup and I try
to hold you in, to hold you still
with my hand on the roof of your world.
And your father surrounds me
as I surround you,
he is my house
opens windows and doors
offers me his arms, offers me his back.
Sometimes he holds you at night,
his hand on my belly, cupped
around your foot, or fist
as you sleep unknowing,
his hands not really hands,
his voice just vibrations
of the air in the eaves
of your tin house, your tent,
this space that I have given you
this room of your own
to stretch into the world
creating
yourself
as we watch, wide-eyed, and wait.
Protection is also available at Amazon