"Bad Mommy / Stay Mommy" by Elisabeth Horan is a blazing myriad of thoughts from her severely depressed mind. Written from the depths of a twirling stifling postpartum haze, Elisabeth's poetry her transcend the macabre. This book of poetry is a visceral, it speaks for all that suffer from mental illness.
While reading these epic gems, I thought "That's me!" But then I realized that no it could never be me, I am not brave like Elisabeth. I am not as self-aware as Elisabeth. I have yet to redeem my self from myself as Elisabeth has done in this collection.
Elisabeth has a true poet's heart, a writer's pain, and the unabashed honesty of a soul torn apart that will be reckoned with, studied, adored and admired for countless generations to come.
A must-read for lovers of works written by the likes of Sylvia Plath, Edgar Allen Poe, and Joan Didion.
Julie Anderson
Publisher of Feminine Collective
""I cower I cackle I burn"--and, yes, the riveting mother does just this in Elisabeth Horan's heartbreakingly raw Bad Mommy / Stay Mommy. The notes of Sylvia Plath ring through the telling fingers of Horan's sharp lines, deeply rooted in the body.
Horan adeptly takes us on the mental health tour, pulling no punches, describing the ride of postpartum depression after birthing her second son, "red and writhing a salamander underfoot," unflinchingly. She bravely depicts the out-at-sea drift of antidepressants. One of the most amazing and gut-wrenching poems in the collection, "Basement Mother," finds her brutally locking herself away: "dragging a stained placenta / Surviv[ing] on its nutrients, for years / in chains, with rats, eating shit / my own eyes, yellow slits, / my vagina locked, breasts defiled." Bad Mommy evokes her suicides and calls them close: Plath and Woolf, naming herself as the third in the pack. But Horan is not quite ready to give into the pocket of rocks, the trauma of rape, the absent father--a trilogy quite terrifying in its own right. Stay Mommy enters just in time and claims, though tenuous, her place and her children. This collection exists to destigmatize the space where mothers are still shamed for postpartum depression and mental illness. Through her wild and wondrous voice, Horan allows so many of us to speak. And to survive."
- Jen Rouse, poet, playwright, and visual artist.
