My Mother Did Not Tell Stories

Laurie Kruk

My Mother Did Not Tell Stories challenges simplistic or sentimental maternal, familial and cultural narratives, by offering contemporary perspectives on women caught between the generations, between self and other, independence and relatedness. Encountering new environments and extended family and community ties, the women in these poems are inspired to make larger links between human, animal, cultural, geographical, political and spiritual realities. But like her first two books, Kruk’s third also focuses on narratives of the heart, speaking in three voices: the mother moving and growing through new chapters of parenting (My Mother Did Not Tell Stories), the former urbanite and Southerner meeting /varieties of “wilderness”at her Ontario ‘camp’ (River Valley Poems), and the Twenty-First Century citizen witnessing and reflecting on the different ways we re-draw our borders while occasionally risking enlarging the circle (Drawing Circles).

“With the heart of poet and a scholar’s steely eye, Laurie Kruk captures her subjects at key “intersections//of public and private.” Though the present may be fraught with “the keening of sirens” and the past often seems “too radioactive to unearth,” Kruk’s subjects—expectant or exhausted mothers, daughters, and grandmothers—ultimately lead her to encounter the miraculous. In these richly textured narratives, Kruk discovers a means to counter despair with hope, honoring the complexities of a life’s immersion in “mother time.”” —Jane Satterfield, author of Daughters of Empire: A Memoir of a Year in Britain and Beyond

About the Author

Born and raised in the suburbs of Toronto, Laurie Kruk is currently Associate Professor of English Studies at Nipissing University in North Bay. Specializing in Canadian Literature, Kruk has published scholarly essays on Carol Shields, Timothy Findley, Joy Kogawa and others, as well as The Voice is the Story: Conversations with Canadian Writers of Short Fiction (Mosaic, 2003). Her poetry has been published in over twenty literary and academic journals or anthologies, culminating in two collections. Her first collection, Theories of the World (Netherlandic Press, 1992), traces the struggle to move from (sheltered, suburban) girlhood to womanhood. Her second, Loving the Alien (Your Scrivener Press, 2006), deals more explicitly with adult relationships, concluding with her initiation into the joy and struggle of mothering.