Republic of Motherhood

*'The Republic of Motherhood' Winner of the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem*‘I crossed the border into the Republic of Motherhoodand found it a queendom, a wild queendom.’In this bold and resonant gathering of poems, Liz Berry turns her distinctive voice to the transformative experience of new motherhood. Her poems sing the body electric, from the joy and anguish of becoming a mother, through its darkest hours to its brightest days. With honesty and unabashed beauty, they bear witness to that most tender of times – when a new life arrives, and everything changes.

An electrifying collection of poems that makes your heart sing, Alongside the tender, heart-breaking moments, there's humour and a visceral energy. These poems transport you, there's something primal in their intimacy... Berry doesn't hold anything back with this collection, its beauty lies in her willingness to embrace the unspoken, the hidden...the wisdom and insight within its pages to be passed around amongst those finding their way into their new identity, Sure to be a comfort to many new mothers, a salve to the soul during a time of huge change, The Republic of Motherhood gives us poems of the greatest importance... This is writing to carry round with you, a pamphlet to open in a schoolroom, a hospital, on a train, in a street, and share its words, its great life and its love, with everyone you can, There was an electric charge to this pamphlet... It’s a pamphlet of love in darkness, full of poems which have something of the holy relic about them

Liz Berry was born in the Black Country and now lives in Birmingham. Her debut collection, Black Country, 'a sooty, soaring hymn to her native West Midlands' (Guardian), won a Somerset Maugham Award, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, and the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Her pamphlet The Republic of Motherhood was a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice and the title poem won the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem 2018. In The Home Child, a novel in verse, she reimagines the story of her great-aunt Eliza Showell, one of the many children forcibly emigrated to Canada as part of the British Child Migrant schemes.