{"id":441,"date":"2026-07-04T19:08:57","date_gmt":"2026-07-04T19:08:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/valutednews.com\/?p=441"},"modified":"2026-07-04T19:08:57","modified_gmt":"2026-07-04T19:08:57","slug":"poems-by-laura-tanenbaum-j-w-mason","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/valutednews.com\/?p=441","title":{"rendered":"Poems by Laura Tanenbaum \u2013 J. W. Mason"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Poems<\/div>

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Readers of this blog know I have a book coming out later this spring \u2014 Against Money<\/em>, officially out on May 7. Plenty of money-related content coming between now and then.<\/p>\n

But today I\u2019m writing about a different book: Dear Mother<\/em>, a collection of poems by Laura Tanenbaum<\/a>, just out from Main Street Rag<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Laura and I have been married for quite a few years now, and known each other for quite a few more. We first met almost exactly 25 years ago, at a grad student party in Northampton Massachusetts. So it\u2019s a funny coincidence that our first books are coming out within a few months of each other.<\/p>\n

Laura is doing a reading from her book this Tuesday, January 27, at Lofty Pigeon, a recently-opened bookstore in our south Brooklyn neighborhood. (The resurgence of independent bookstores<\/a> is one positive development in the contemporary US that I would not have expected<\/a> a few years ago.)<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re in New York and into poetry, you should stop by. Admittedly I am far from unbiased. But I think the poems are very good. Here are a couple of them.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

IN-LAWS<\/p>\n

\u201cIn five years, I\u2019m going to fall in love with a fish,\u201d the four-year-old declares, over hard-boiled eggs, on a ninety-degree day, to no one in particular. \u201cThey will be rainbow-colored with gray and black stripes. I will teach them to walk on their fin so they can come to our house. And I will teach them how to breathe. I will say, \u2018It\u2019s easy, fish. Just breathe like you did in water; only, it\u2019s air.\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n

His brother tells him he might need to compromise. Maybe six months on land, six months in the water, like the high-powered couples do. No, he says, concerned. The fish has to come to him. I\u2019m watching his concern, trying to see which plane of reality he\u2019s accessing, except that I no longer know what I mean by this. I know only that the words \u201cimagination\u201d and \u201cmetaphor\u201d are insufficient to the task. And so I take his side. After all, we\u2019ve learned from David Attenborough that evolution has carried countless creatures from the sea to us, not one has reversed course. When you forget how to make gills, they stay forgotten.<\/p>\n

All of this may be why, the next day, after the temperatures had plunged thirty degrees overnight and the NYC Parks department and I both failed to adjust\u2014me without a jacket, them, blasting the sprinklers\u2014I was the only one who didn\u2019t rush to pull a child back from the flood. He stomped on every fountainhead, threw himself on the ground. When he came to me, shivering, and the only change of clothes I had was shorts, and I saw the mother who had frantically been calling her Juniper back from the brink shoot me the look reserved for the parents of bad-example children, it took everything I had not to shout, You don\u2019t understand! He\u2019s looking for his fishwife! Wants to learn to live in her world! Learning to be flexible! And aren\u2019t they going to need that what with the world and everything\u2026<\/em> Because I\u2019m sure that Juniper\u2019s mother would understand. That, like me, she has trouble imagining the future these days. That she would be comforted as I am by the thought of my future self, a crone in a cave, welcoming in any creature still capable of both tenderness and survival, teaching my son to tend to her scales.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

2001: A SLEEP ODYSSEY<\/p>\n

When my mother died,
I was six months in.
His body the size of a melon slice;
her body vaporized.<\/p>\n

The mothers warn:
Sleep now, sleep deep.
Soon you\u2019ll be in bits,
every hour broken.<\/p>\n

Three months to go:
A second child.
Horizon long
as the rocket\u2019s destination.<\/p>\n

But no sleep came.
It\u2019s winter now.
Five years have passed.
The melon slice half grown.<\/p>\n

When my mother died,
I was six months in.
Tonight we watch the skies.
This time rest rushes forth.<\/p>\n

Deeper, rounder,
with padded edges,
a floating bottom.
I sleep through half of 2001<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Just as the mothers warned.
When I woke, it faced me:
that stupid floating baby,
whimpering like a lost doe.<\/p>\n

The others wondered why the baby.
Was it back to the apes?
Back to their own losses?
Was it the need to obliterate?<\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t wonder.
When my mother died,
I was six months in.
The movie\u2019s future firmly in the past.<\/p>\n

I already knew.
Nothing worth living happens in order.
Whether you wake for the ending,
or jolt back, or whether you miss it all.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Readers of this blog know I have a book coming out later this spring \u2014 Against Money, officially out on May 7. Plenty of money-related content coming between now and then. But today I\u2019m writing about a different book: Dear Mother, a collection of poems by Laura Tanenbaum, just out from Main Street Rag. Laura…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":442,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/jwmason.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/https-cdn.evbuc_.com-images-1172415571-1754736761923-1-original.20251205-213840.jpeg?resize=660%2C330","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[940,213,939,941],"class_list":["post-441","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-economy","tag-laura","tag-mason","tag-poems","tag-tanenbaum"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/valutednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/441","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/valutednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/valutednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/valutednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/valutednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=441"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/valutednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/441\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/valutednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/442"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/valutednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=441"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/valutednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=441"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/valutednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=441"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}