with Laurel Radzieski

Poetry Book By Laurel Radzieski

Red Mother

Winner of the 2020 Whirling Prize in Poetry

Sometimes we all feel as if our relationships consume us. In Red Mother Laurel Radzieski weaves a love story told from the perspective of a parasite. This series of short poems explores the intimacy, desire and devotion we all experience by following the sometimes tender, often distressing relationship that emerges between a parasite and its host. Radzieski’s poetry is playful, though often with sinister undertones. Far from romanticizing either role, Red Mother takes readers on a tour of their own innards, exposing the hooks and claws of all involved. Following the parasite’s life cycle, the book blurs the line between science and poetic license to create a fantastical romp not for the squeamish. Although parasites are not known as conversationalists, Radzieski’s guest has a lot to say.

2020 WHIRLING PRIZE:
Laurel Radzieski's Red Mother Broadside,
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Etchings Press Mercantile

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Douglas A. Martin

author of In the Time of Assignments and Acker

In these compact folds, curls of words on page in coiled small shapes, host body becomes night sky and increasingly intimate terms flex gut songs. Germ fable churns in compositional allegory, and a Frankenstein story is rescaled and mutates on the level of cell and issue. Laurel Radzieski is a wildly original poet in this purging of confusion and charges with whom or what speaks through what we or one carries around in the cosmos inside.

Kenna O’Rourke

Jacket2 Capsule Review

Red Mother asks the reader to consider a meaty host’s innards as objects of desire: written from the perspective of a parasite, these short poems force us to “Imagine a blemish / or, better yet, a sore” with a kind of twisted love. Like a teeming catalog of left-justified grubs, Radzieski’s poems become progressively more objectifying, abusive, desperate for pure disembodied flesh. Where the speaker-worm begins from a place of supposed tenderness — “This is a love poem / I’ll prove it to you” — its impending demise, a growing hunger for possession, soon turns it egomaniacal: “I am securing / your humanity. … A ‘thank you’ / would be nice”; “If I was so unwanted / why did you lead me on / with your fluids?” To be human, the poems imply, is to writhe and squirm with that which eats away at you, those particular types of repulsive creatures so blind to their own being that they ask “Is this my anus / or my mouth / or something more useful?”

Sara-Kate Astrove

"10 New Books to Change the Way We Look at Our Bodies," sheknows.com

If you're in the mood for some wackier fare, Red Mother by poet Laurel Radzieski depicts an all-consuming love affair -- between a parasite and its host. Told from the parasite's perspective, Radzieski's quirky yet sinister poems take the reader through the organism's life cycle, teetering between science and imagination. Red Mother is a dark tale of longing, achieving the perfect balance of horror and romance.

Kenny Fries

author of In the Province of the Gods and In the Gardens of Japan

For a metaphor to work it needs to be real and Laurel Radzieski, in Red Mother, gives voice to an all too real parasite. A cross between Kafka and a horror film, these concise, concrete poems slowly burn until they overtake us through profound recognition. Dare we call her parasite love?"

Stephen S. Mills

author of He Do the Gay Man in Different Voices and A History of the Unmarried

Halfway through Laurel Radzieski's Red Mother she writes, "There are so many ways to tell this story, / all sickening. / So much of who we are / requires purging." With that idea in mind, there are many ways to read this inventive and complex collection of short poems that take on the life cycle of a parasite. The poems are at once scientific and fantastical but can easily be a metaphor for our own dependent relationships. Radzieski's sparse style brings a sharp cleanness to a rather messy topic.

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Author and Poet

Laurel Radzieski

Laurel Radzieski is a poet and the author of Red Mother (NYQ Books, 2018) which won the 2020 Whirling Prize in Poetry from Etchings Press. She was a finalist for the 2024 Sowell Emerging Writers Prize presented by the Sowell Collection, Terrain.org, and Texas Tech University Press. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The New York Quarterly, Rust + Moth, Atlas and Alice, Clockhouse, HOOT, Kosmos Journal, House of Zolo’s Journal of Speculative Literature, Witcraft, and elsewhere, including on a street sign and roadsides in Wisconsin. She has been a writer-in-residence at Wormfarm Institute. Laurel enjoys writing poems for strangers in public places on an electric typewriter. She is the Director of Grants at Alvernia University and teaches writing workshops for youth and adults. When not writing poetry or grant writing, she can usually be found playing board games and tabletop role playing games. Laurel earned her MFA at Goddard College and her BA at Keystone College. She lives in Reading, Pennsylvania.

Digest some of Laurel’s Work …

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Helpful Wellness Tips for Women
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Meet The Poet

The Spring 2024 Edition Of Word To Word With Feature Logan Chace, Jon Lawrence, And Laurel Radzieski Followed By A Limited Open Mic.

August 31, 2024
12:00 PM – 3:00 PM

Lancaster Troll Market 44
North Queen Street, 1004A
Lancaster, PA 17603

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… I write poems about tacos wherever I go, but more than being about food, the poems are about relationships. They are about the feeling of being home.