How I Kiss Her Turning Head

How I Kiss Her Turning Head

Short Fiction, reads like a novella. Beneath the current of a mother's love is a dangerous undertow. Jennifer Woodworth's stories show us the obsessions that motivate her characters' actions, and build into waves that crash upon the shoreline of our subconscious. How I Kiss Her Turning Head won the Honorable Mention and publication in Monkey Puzzle's Prose Chapbook Contest. Editorial Reviews: 1. A review from Beth Castrodale of Small Press Picks: The stories in Jennifer Woodworth’s strangely beautiful How I Kiss Her Turning Head examine the most primal aspects of mother-child bonds, bonds that can surpass love and approach obsession, yet, within the small, warm worlds of their origins, feel natural and necessary. Throughout the book, Woodworth takes us to the physical and emotional heart of such connections, with vivid descriptions like this one, from “Stork Scissors & Baby Toes,” in which the narrator finds the scissors of the title too indelicate for her newborn’s toes: Mommies rock for weeks, barely moving from the chair, nursing their newborns, completely alone: They find their secret joys. Baby toes are one of them. You can hold them between two fingers and they look just like five little sugar snap peas in a pod. We love to run our lips across baby's toes and use the tip of the tongue to find the longest nails, and the incisors to gently cut the extra away... But the desire to bond can have a darker side, as suggested in the opening story, “Mother of One,” in which the narrator, the mother of a single child, desires another and, thwarted in that desire, takes in an infant for daycare... The narrator observes: I wanted the baby to feel like she was still with her mommy so she wouldn’t cry. I guess I wasn’t her mommy, but it sure felt to the two of us like I was. I mean, who was her mommy? ... Though this story doesn’t directly address the anxieties of either stay-at-home or working mothers, these anxieties (and the unfair judgments leveled against both groups of women) are very much in the background, and they encourage us, the readers, to examine our own beliefs and potential prejudices. One of the most beautiful, sweetly sad aspects of the collection is Woodworth’s writing about the fleeting nature of the connection between mothers and very young children, who haven’t yet turned—or who have just started to turn—away from their parents and toward the larger world. ... To the protagonists, this [mother-baby] connection comes to the exclusion of almost everything else, suggesting, at times, a potentially worrisome obsession. Yet, again, it also feels like the most natural thing in the world. Would My Pick be Your Pick? If you’re interested in ________, the answer may be “Yes”: Making Babies by Anne Enright (nonfiction) The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson Any books about the mother-child bond by Beth Castrodale, Smallpresspicks.com _________ 2. A Review by Carl Nelson, Dramatist, Poet, Essayist "Maternal Horror" Jennifer Woodworth ’s newest book, How I Kiss Her Turning Head , ...from Monkey Puzzle Press, is a most gentle jaunt into the genre of Maternal Horror. ‘Maternal Horror’ is a term I have had to coin myself. But this is not Rosemary’s Baby. This is the Brahms Lullaby of Xtreme Mothering. The baby and child in these stories and sketches comprise a wonderful blessing – so wonderful, that we follow our first person hero as if pushing off down the pipe of some Xtreme Sport … ... Our author knows a subtext...and a rebellious flight of words... Her words and flights of fancy are cloaked like actors to carry more romantic weight [...] Asperger of mothering, with the soft voice, and gentle nudging of the genuinely aware close to the voice of this narrator. --Carl Nelson