Cadence captures the poet’s point of view as a new mother, reveling in a position of heightened vulnerability and ferocity. The poems in this chapbook are breathless, hyper­attentive to others’ needs, and equally in love with earthliness and repulsed by the monstrousness we enact/bear witness to.

The central tenets of this chapbook: ideas of the body, pregnancy, and motherhood; how becoming a parent destabilizes the self; local anxieties (What if my child doesn’t eat enough? How will I ever sleep again?) and global anxieties (How do we respond to these tumultuous times, full of such hate, racism, and xenophobia? How do we help?); and the ever-deepening desire to protect those who are (increasingly) threatened.