Preeti Vangani's Fifty Mothers weaves narrative and elegy around the figure of a mother, the poems unfolding in the speaker's Bombay home. Pierced with joy, with music and sweat, traffic and smoke, the collection layers family dynamics, gender roles, and the pain and pleasure of the speaker's body, while drawing a living, lyric line between the "gone mother" and daughter. These poems are the fiercely loving, grieving, sexual, and always-processing songs for the grown children of mothers living in a world that takes without asking. In the keen, interwoven contexts of grief, physical pain, and lyric poetry, Vangani's Fifty Mothers considers the variety of the phenomenal world and discovers in its living wake an abundance of taste, touch, and mothers.
