Eight Songs of [Mothering] & [Capacity] delves into the demanding journey of raising children as a single mother in a society calibrated for two-parent families, where to be a single mother is seeded with stigma and shame. This collection revisits that marginal experience, decisions made in extremis, grappling with the challenges of premature adulthood, intertwined with intergenerational trauma. It is a call to the social condition that undervalues the profound role of mothering. The poems articulate the shame which became a process of unmothering, leading to states of hyper-productivity, and distracted and disturbed mothering, to justify the validity of being. The poems are apologies, lamentations, a cataloguing of survival and endurance.

Dorothy Lehane is the author of six poetry publications: House Girl (Aquifer Press), I’m Very Interested in Falling in Love With You (Run Amok Press) Bettbehandlung (Muscaliet Press), Umwelt (Leafe Press), Ephemeris (Nine Arches Press) and Places of Articulation (dancing girl press). She has a PhD in Poetry, Text as Practice in the Medical Humanities field from the University of Kent. Since the lockdowns has been working on a non-fiction turned audiovisual project about caves, funded by the British Academy/ Leverhulme, Society of Authors, and the Arts Council. 

The cover art is by Chloe Bonfield, who created the image by feeding every page of the text through a risograph printer.

ISBN 978-1-913749-42-2 / 88 pages / 195 x 120mm / made on Arena and Pastel Heart Attack papers