Flutter, Kick

Wary and watchful, never resigned, Flutter, Kick maps the spaces for tenderness we carve in a dangerous world.

In her award-winning second book, Anna V. Q. Ross transforms motherhood into a lens, examining narratives of girlhood, migration, trauma, and inheritance. Compassing home and horizon, this tightly woven, image-rich collection plumbs the political within the domestic and traces the routes of the past within everyday life. A bruise becomes a flower and then a flag planted to claim an adopted land; the hull of a Viking ship becomes the fuselage of a plane carrying an immigrating mother home; the daily routines of carpools, math homework, and bedtime stories are interrupted by memories of abuse and reports of school shootings and environmental collapse. But at heart, these are poems of reclamation, reminding us that “in those days, we were fast and best, but didn’t know it.” Wary and watchful, never resigned, Flutter, Kick maps the spaces for compassion we carve in a dangerous world.