Georgia Pearle Foster’s poems have appeared in Ninth Letter, Kenyon Review Online, and WSQ, among others. She is an alumna of Smith College, holds an MFA from Lesley University and a PhD from the University of Houston. She currently lives and teaches in Southeastern Idaho, has four children and runs Foster Literary, a literary cooperative, with her husband, writer Joshua Dewain Foster. Her first collection of poetry, Refinery, was released in 2022, and she is currently at work on a second collection of poems as well as a memoir. 

From the author’s Statement of Purpose: The Patriarchs is, ironically, a collection of poems primarily about motherhood. I currently have roughly fifty pages of poems in draft form, many of which need revision, with another thirty to forty pages of fragments and rough translations in need of shaping. Poems from this collection have appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Ninth Letter, and Kenyon Review, among others, with many more out for submission to highly ranked literary journals.

“Notes on a Small Handful of Patriarchs,” feels to me like a cornerstone poem of this book. The final manuscript will include creative translations of Old English Metrical Charms for Successful Pregnancy and Delayed Birth, and the Old English poems A Mother’s Fears (“The Fortunes of Men”) and The Husband’s Message, as well as sequences of epistolary poems written in the voices of mothers to their children, to their children’s fathers, and to themselves. These voices are meant to be from a multiplicity of contemporary experiences, from the single mother whose children’s father has been lost to addiction to the mother who is raising her children in a marriage with deep, multivalent love and support.

In an era where “tradwives” are dominating social media with presences that soothe and reduce the messiness of daily human growth to simple, curated product placements, and when romance novels are being read at a far greater clip than any other type of book, I hope these poems can offer a different sort of texture, depth, and complexity to the subject. I see the wider culture putting us at such great odds—gender wars widening the relational gap between young men and women, with fewer people of my own generation and younger wanting families at all—that it feels timely to me to be excavating some of these tensions in my work.