Bluewords Greening

Bluewords Greening is a book about motherhood-love and family and fear and failure and mini-ninjas. We observe a mother's bewildering experiences with her son as the poems detail his diagnosis with a rare form of epilepsy and the "bluewords" that result from his aphasia. The speaker is in deep conversation with the son's frustrated and often surprisingly beautiful lexicon; she's also in conversation with the work of contemporary visual artists and the craft of printmaking and the twelfth-century visionary, St. Hildegard. Stewart-Nuñez's music and skilled syntax and stubborn insistence on the beauty of the world-even as the poems explore the heartbreak of recurrent miscarriage-keep the reader rapt and grateful and illuminated. Bluewords Greening is a marvelous book.

-Beth Ann Fennelly, Great With Child: Letters to a Young Mother