Motherlunge (New Issues Poetry & Prose)

Fiction. MOTHERLUNGE is an eloquent and irreverent debut novel about first sex, true love, and chronic sibling rivalry; it's about the deepest fear of young (and not-so-young) adulthood: the fear of inheriting a disappointing life. It's motherly advice, too—featuring wigs, dogs, road trips, and medicine—a guide to the essential experiences of being female, "born unto a librarian, named for the goddess of sight," waiting for the future to arrive. With sly wit and surprising joy, MOTHERLUNGE considers the flaws in the family line and celebrates the promise that staggers alongside.

"[V]oice is where Kirstin Scott astonishes, both in the gutsy yet precise and lyrical voice of her narrator Thea, and in the brilliantly realized voices that Scott bestows on the rest of Thea's family. Here we have a tribe of mothers-gone-wrong and their sidelined, well-meaning, hapless men—and yet, owing to the sheer inventiveness of Scott's prose style, the family portrait that emerges is almost (well, not quite) affirmative. We believe in these characters and even believe that some good—some human equivalent of that ribald, generous and knowing voice—will come out of all this."—Jaimy Gordon