Poetry. Owing something to the New York School-influenced writing of contemporaries such as Alice Notley and Bernadette Mayer, Susan Cataldos THE MOTHER JOURNAL is at the same time a wholly original approach, a subtle and intertwined investigationMorePoetry. Owing something to the New York School-influenced writing of contemporaries such as Alice Notley and Bernadette Mayer, Susan Cataldos THE MOTHER JOURNAL is at the same time a wholly original approach, a subtle and intertwined investigation of both the death of her mother in 1961 (during Cataldos early youth) and her own motherhood, which began at the tender age of fifteen.
The long title poem takes up much of the book, and few poems can equal it in intensity or spare lyricism. Long associated with The Poetry Project at St. Marks Church-in-the-Bowery, Cataldo discovered she had ovarian cancer in 1998 and died of it three years later, in the Bronx, on April 25, 2001.