Museum of Stones

Museum of Stones is a magnificent and bracing trek through motherhood. In a series of well-placed stones of urgent prose poetry, it reveals the fates in store for this newborn boy: wrists “no wider than a straw” and sternum sporting a tiny tower of gauze, hospital monitors aglow in their wide range of numbers and, later, “neatly folded sheets of paper crammed with lists of [the boy’s] numerical codes”. The book illumines the mutable states of the mother: the means by which she must carve herself, with “no distortions or duplications”, from what precious daily clay is left.