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poems by
ISBN: 978-1-964277-63-9, 76 pages, $14 (+ shipping)
Release Date: December 17, 2025 (advance sales ship 1/5/2026)
The Advance Sale Discount price on this title has expired. For those who prefer to pay by check, the price is $19/book (which includes shipping & sales tax) and should be sent to: Main Street Rag, 12180 Skyview Drive, Edinboro, PA 16412.
Laura Tanenbaum is a Professor of English at LaGuardia Community College, City University of New York, where she has taught composition, literature and creative writing for eighteen years. She also serves as a union representative at LaGuardia. In addition to poems and short stories, she has published essays and book reviews for The New York Times Book Review, The New Republic, Dissent, and elsewhere. Originally from the Chicago area, she lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two school-age children.
Laura Tanenbaum’s poems summon the strange, straining, sustaining simultaneity of midlife: grieving a mother while being a mother; teaching the alphabet to a new generation and writing letters to the dead; time traveling in memory and desire to the past and future. She pulls us deep into the magic logic of childhood jokes and the spiraling wonder of how “the newest bodies, like the oldest, curl inward.” Her voice is evidence that language can make family feelings both endurable and enduring. ~Briallen Hopper
A tender, moving collection, Laura Tanenbaum’s Dear Mother emphasizes how we seek poetry “because the words matter or nothing does.” These poems are to mother, to self and city, to the everyday and the forever, and most of all, to language and legacy. Tanenbaum, offers us “a reminder that the dented/ version of life belongs to us” and that we hold that life in our A’s and O’s and in our necessary never-ending elegies. ~Nicole Callihan, author of This Strange Garment (2023) & SLIP (2025)
When my mother died,
I was six months in.
His body the size of a melon slice;
her body vaporized.
The mothers warn:
sleep now, sleep deep.
Soon you’ll be in bits,
Every hour broken.
Three months to go:
a second child.
Horizon long
as the rocket’s destination.
But no sleep came.
It’s winter now.
Five years have passed.
The melon slice half grown.
When my mother died,
I was six months in.
Tonight we watch the skies.
This time rest rushes forth.
Deeper, rounder,
with padded edges,
a floating bottom.
I sleep through half of 2001.
Just as the mothers warned.
When I woke, it faced me:
that stupid floating baby,
whimpering like a lost doe’s cry.
The others wondered why the baby.
Was it back to the apes?
Back to their own losses?
Was it the need to obliterate?
I didn’t wonder.
When my mother died,
I was six months in.
The movie’s future firmly in the past.
I already knew.
Nothing worth living happens in order.
Whether you wake for the ending,
or jolt back, or whether you miss it all.
Dear Mother,
It’s Saturday and we’ve been practicing letters.
Today I tried to teach him O.
His name starts with A like yours.
But O must be the first letter: its open mouth
calling forth; the shape-shifted center.
Dear mother,
I sat by him,
& I’m trying to remember it:
sitting with you, your lessons.
I don’t remember if you taught me to read.
If I were to write the memory,
it would go like this:
one day I could not read;
the next I could. & the next
I was here writing you.
Teaching tells me
this is not how the world becomes.
Motherhood tells me
to clomp stubborn children
who could believe such things.
And yet: I believe it.
One day I could not read;
the next I could.
Was sticky in the streets & I wanted to linger
in the theater with the girls on the screen:
girls called girls for a reason: soft, tragic, funny,
swimming in sweaters that could last a lifetime,
like Diana’s black sheep knit the year she flirted with the horse guy.
But it was midnight. Time to blast our bodies
through the tunnel. That night I wanted to walk for hours
instead, not because the subway was hot
or crowded and certainly not unsafe, but because
it was one of those nights when the outside air
belongs inside and the inside, outside, and it appears
all our structures, even our cells, had failed their most basic function,
to keep the insides, inside, and the outside, out;
The way our rooms fail us now, a two-inch band of ants
appearing next to our air-conditioner; they’ve taken wings,
in hope and preparation for a colony. It’s a poor choice.
Pushing them outside an act of mercy.
Many will not make it.
& so, the night Diana died I walked twenty scorched blocks
until my shoes gave out, like in the blues songs &
I was somewhere strange & it was two
before I made it up the flight of my little breadbox, turned
on the radio and heard how Diana had gone
into another tunnel and not come out. Just
that day I’d been arguing with a friend about the royals &
their worthlessness & now there she went and was gone.
The words ended but the voice went on,
top of the hour, announcing the weather &
that her dying would go on & on &
I listened for hours, open-mouthed. Come morning I still
had no one to meet and nowhere
to be. I used to think the worst fate was this,
to be a being with no people. I now know this
to be true, and yet, that night
did not last, it was not the only night that has tilted
into vision & there have been thousands of tunnels
in the years since that night & not one of them
has swallowed me whole.