Maria Upton

Review of Children of Apartness

In Children of Apartness Upton is determined to make a poetry allied with the forces of life. “This is about words,” she says in the first poem of the book, “(c)hildren are words!… words from the womb/from the Primal Mother/from the Void.” Here is a poet of passion­ate commitment who expli­cates the complex and mysteri­ous ways in which the lives of us who have been touched by oppression intersect. Her poetry is a loving call across space and time—”the way skin calls skin/the way wave calls wave/the way woman calls woman”—for change.
—Toi Derricote