DM Me, Mother Darling by Alexa Doran reviewed by Dorsey Craft

Review: DM Me, Mother Darling by Alexa Doran

reviewed by Dorsey Craft

Bauhan Publishing (April 6, 2021)

ISBN-13 : 978-0872333307

“Love is forever a holding onto”: Alexa Doran’s DM Me, Mother Darling

In her erotically sonic debut, Alexa Doran crafts an alternative Peter Pan myth from the persona of Mother Darling. As Mother Darling copes with misdirected grief and shame over the loss of Wendy, Michael, and John, a second speaker struggles to raise her son alone and authentically against a backdrop of 21st century American atrocities. The interplay between these two personas allows Doran to delve into spirituality and desire, gender and language. Like Whitman she sings the body electric, but Doran pushes into sticky inner realms of mother-love with fearless intensity and playful refusal of that prissy, pre-packaged mommy-dom that fairy tales foist upon us. Like any honest mother, Doran and Mother Darling will tell you: motherhood never turns out the way you plan it.

Doran’s Mother Darling is a woman in freefall, a woman whose pain neither Disney nor J.M. Barrie have any interest in. She puts her house on the market, plays slots in a casino, leaves London behind for New York, because, as her therapist tells her, “For mums like me / belief is the new baby.” With her children lost to her, she oscillates between distraction and longing. In “Mother Darling Waits by the Window”, we see Mother Darling grasping for shreds of the children she lost: 

………………….…Oh Wendy

………………….I wasn’t thinking of the winter of it. 

………………….Had I understood the humdrum of high alert, 

………………….How your gauze blue dress would haunt me

………………….Wendy, what do you see? 

Mother Darling simultaneously runs toward and away from this “humdrum of high alert,” the fatigue that stems from motherhood’s constant vigilance. The “gauze blue dress” that haunts the speaker weaves throughout the collection, a scrap of Wendy’s physical presence that Mother Darling tries in vain to ghost into the real thing. In “Mother Darling’s Police Report,” we see Mother Darling again reach out for snatches of her children’s corporeality, 

………………….…Death

………………….Where is thy sting? Often I question what I am

………………….Waiting for. A femur? An eyelash to shore?

………………….How much body must they see before 

………………….They exonerate me? 

Mother Darling is forever locked in a reckoning with death, which, from her perspective, resists binaries and definitions. Her children are lost to her physically, but she is keenly aware of their kidnapped status, their place in the myth. DM Me, Mother Darling trades in legend; it seeks the spiritual in the circularity of re-telling. 

As Mother Darling speaks her children back into being, Doran’s contemporary speaker reaches into Judeo-Christian creation myth to understand her own awe at the body of her son and her inability to invent new language of praise to lavish upon him. In the poem “<after my body was raided>,” Doran’s speaker describes the birth of her son in terms that bring beauty to a raw, corporeal experience: “I gave birth to a rainbow. / A uterus / slick confection.”  This kind of image abounds in Doran’s collection, the abjection of the maternal body takes place alongside the speaker’s urgent need to right—and write—the world for her son, to let him see her only as “a goddess, tender-shrunk.” When her son asks “‘Ma, I a bird?’” Doran’s speaker questions how she could ever say no. 

But Doran’s speaker is hyper-conscious of the inevitable moments when the body betrays, and the potential for disgust is never far from the collection’s lens. In “Kerygma 2: The Aesthetics of Aging,” the speaker revisits a moment from her own childhood watching her mother “sweaty and happy” doing aerobics along with a faltering video tape. But Doran, ever resistant to romanticizing, chills with her unfiltered, child emotion: “The cling of her flamingo pink / shorts and JC Penney perm in cahoots against / me. I wanted her to know she was ugly.” As in awe of the body as she is, the speaker is haunted by the idea that her son will someday view her in this unflattering light. In “Ode to a Far-Off Dante,” she considers the culmination of a lifetime of close encounters between her son and his mother’s body: 

………………….I’m just not sure how to cover 

………………….up the bruise my mother left when she undressed, 

………………….each stretch mark a violet unscrewed. Buggy, 

………………….I don’t want to do that to you. 

………………….So let’s build a curtain for every fetid freckle. 

………………….Let’s quilt a cover for every tooth. Let’s fish

………………….for smoke and vial and vial the dew—anything

………………….to contain me, to gutter the shame taking root. 

One of DM Me, Mother Darling’s great strengths is resisting the empty platitudes of body positivity. Both of Doran’s speakers are concerned with the body, its intricacies and liquids, without masking its every mark in faux-celebration. Doran’s speaker would rather live in contradictions than make compromises about her son’s psyche, would rather imagine the body covered inch by inch than replicate the shame she lives with. 

To suggest that DM Me, Mother Darling is concerned only with the physicality of mothering, however, would be to rob it of perhaps its most ambitious material. In both the Mother Darling poems and the poems from the contemporary speaker, Doran revisits a lust for the existential question again and again. Both speakers are utterly disillusioned with America’s cruelty and their place in its structures. Mother Darling speaks of joining “The American McDeath Party,” and in “To My Son, Who Just Heard Me Scream Fuck,” the speaker wrestles with her urge not to reproduce the patriarchy in her son: 

………………….This is about America’s hard-on

………………….for atrocity, and your mama’s sugar/fire/need

………………….to plug those geysers of white male greed. It’s true, 

………………….I infringe. I jostle. I say irrevocable things. 

………………….All to cage you in. 

“On the Bridge at the Black Bear Exhibit” asks whether the zoo is really offering an experience with nature and if the speaker would want her son to see it if it were possible—in the end the poem suggests that the raw animal power of the black bear will never be as frightening as flicking on the television in front of her son to “Show him the KKK.” Motherhood, DM Me, Mother Darling, seems to say, is a collection of moments one cannot take back. Pain and shame can be delayed, mitigated, raged at, but once they’ve been visited upon the child’s psyche they are there to stay. 

In one of the most striking moments of the collection, Mother Darling discusses her new OkCupid profile: 

………………….I never say mother, I say architect

………………….I say body builder, bricklayer of breath

………………….I say grief so deep it’s just another 

………………………………….orifice by which to fuck me…

This profound loss coupled with raw exhibition of desire defines this debut—it wants to plummet as well as soar, to speak of how a mother loses her child day after day even as she clings to his hair, his teeth, his feet. In “Some Call It Bounty,” Doran’s contemporary speaker imagines herself among the hoarders on her television, the ones who “bricked themselves in Barbies” and “sang suppurating songs to rats.” “Love is forever a holding onto,” Doran writes, “they don’t / want to believe love is obscene.” DM Me, Mother Darling sears its argument in the flesh, demands that any rhapsodies we sing for our children be flecked in saliva, grieves for loss of innocence even as it recognizes that such a thing never existed. Doran has crafted an exceptionally nuanced debut, an ode to motherhood in the internet- and post-truth-ages that simply refuses to let go.  

Dorsey Craft is the author Plunder (Bauhan 2020) winner of the 2019 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, Colorado Review, Gulf Coast, Massachusetts Review, Poetry Daily, Southern Indiana Review, and elsewhere. She currently serves as Poetry Editor for Southeast Review.