Tyger-Tyger

This poetry chapbook, Tyger-Tyger, meditates on the collision of trauma and motherhood. Memory appears as a central character as it is refracted and smudged over the nonlinear narrative. Each poem insists that maternal love is both soft and fierce, as the mother tiger paws through the human house, ready to protect her cub and lie down beside her. While the work contains an abundance of fruit and nets of sunlight, it also reveals dark undercurrents of personal and societal violence. Here, among rivers and orchards: lemons, tangerines, and apples abound, and yet an insatiable hunger to be transformed by something beyond the earth and its fruit repeats itself. The author lays out the themes of motherhood and "recovery" - not in the sense of being restored to a lost wholeness but rather to a new appreciation of the beauty that was always there. At its core, Tyger-Tyger is a love note from mother to daughter, and, to the mother's surprise, the child responds ...

About the author: Siobhan Casey earned her MFA from Chatham University in 2011, with a focus in Poetry and Creative Nonfiction. Since then, she has been blending art and writing into community-building and inclusive elementary education endeavors. She currently resides with her family in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where she can be found following her zany dog and daughter along the hidden trails that feel most like home. Official author website: https://www.siobhan-casey.com/

PRAISE:

“Gentle and fierce, Siobhan Casey’s Tyger-Tyger is a breathtaking contradiction. There are bodies that betray, absent partners, and song after song of survival. Yet, there is so much fruit, an abundance of flowers, and the wonder of a child asking for more ducks, more dahlias, more of what makes life living for. Casey knows there are many ways of mending. But this collection, is mended: the pieces reexamined and restored, into something much stronger than it was before.” –Vincent Rendoni, author of Dead Chicano Mixtape and A Grito Contest in the Afterlife

“Siobhan Casey’s Tyger-Tyger summons attention, tenacity, and tenderness to the work of hope. Exploring devotion and self-compassion, Casey’s poems link hands with their reader to form a “bridge that glows for miles.” –Violeta Garcia-Mendoza, author of Songs for the Land Bound

“Throughout Tyger-Tyger Siobhan Casey asks us to appreciate ‘mended beauty.’ She doesn’t try to hide her hurts, but she finds ways, time and again, to celebrate beauty that she presents as ever emerging. It’s terrific work through and through, a compact chapbook that speaks to someone who’s understood herself as broken and emerged stronger at the rewoven break, grateful for the fresh beauty of a world that she and her tyger daughter have the privilege to discover in tandem.” –Joe Kraus, author of The Kosher Capones and An Accidental Anarchist