motherlodePublication Date - October 1, 2026
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Bring a reading of Motherlode to your local bookstore, poetry reading, café or library.
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Every person is impacted by a dementia diagnosis in the family. While the pain of watching a loved one disappear little by little, is often discussed, what happens when the relationship wasn’t easy? Sometimes, the disease is not stealing something precious, but dismantling the careful negotiations a mother and daughter built over decades. The silences, the deflections, the rules about what can and cannot be said must all dissolve, and yet, Motherlode, by Kimberly Dark, shows how love and care can be left in their place.
This poetry collection, at turns poignant, funny, hopeful, and always accessible — navigates the journey of chaos and care that every family member of a dementia patient will recognize. In Dark’s particular case though, the disease forced an intimacy with her mother that neither would have chosen willingly. They disappointed each other often, and yet, chose an ongoing relationship. |
Book Release Tour: Coming Soon!
- Join us 7pm - 8pm October 15th in Portland, OR, for a book release event at Annie Bloom's Books!
- Stay tuned for more event dates!
Advanced Praise for Motherlode
“In her collection Motherlode, Kimberly Dark maps the unmappable: the onset and progression of her mother’s dementia. With clear-eyed accountability and relentless compassion, Dark chronicles mother-daughter failure, but insistently resists blame. She writes, “I love my mother. There is no / alternative… I love her because it’s / the only thing that works.” Ultimately, Dark concludes that mother-love equals self-love in the reciprocity of a changed reality. Near the end of the collection, she offers, “Whatever’s brutal in the mind / shifts to love again with time /(and maybe back). / Just wait.” There is much for a reader to learn here about losing and finding; about flaws, forgiveness, and the tenacity of love.”
-Laura Apol, author of Cauterized, former Poet Laureate of Lansing, Michigan
“In Motherlode Kimberly Dark boldly confronts the myth of the loving mom, giving voice instead to those of us who survived mothers who couldn’t or wouldn’t love us. Dark gives readers a necessary window into survival, uneasy truces, acceptance, and self-protection. These poems are at once deeply personal and profoundly relatable for any of us who have had brutal parents, dealt with their aging, and had to decide how involved (or not) we would be. Most of all, Dark gives a roadmap for weaving self protection and self-love in difficult times while mothering ourselves the way many mothers failed to do. ”
- Sassafras Patterdale, author of Kicked Out, Lost Boi
“Motherlode is a loadstar for women who have carried too much for too long. Arranging and de-arranging a mother-daughter relationship, fraught with difficulty, blessed with micro graces, these poems vibrate, accumulate, reverberate like a heart beating for all its worth. In the end, this beautiful poem-scape seems to suggest, we are all coming home, back into the everything, from which we were born. A heart song. An umbilical to grace.”
-Lidia Yuknavitch, bestselling author of Chronology of Water, and Thrust
“Motherlode brilliantly unburdens and unsettles the impossible expectations of not only how we relate to our mother, but also how we write and think about that relationship. With beautiful and powerful language that simultaneously soothes and sears with its truths, Dark invites us to probe gently at the way we show up when things, bodies, and memories fall apart… This is the book I didn’t know I needed to heal my own relationship with my mother." -L. Ayu Saraswati., author of Scarred: A Feminist Journey Through Pain.
“Dark’s collection is a bold and beautiful meditation on imperfect mothers, mothering, and motherhood through aging and dementia and ultimately, love. These poems do not flinch as they detail the ways we are asked tooled our bodies and expectations to a culture that disciplines anyone that refuses to fit into neat categories of mother and daughter.”
-Sandra L. Faulkner, Author of Poetic Inquiry: Craft, Method, and Practice
"Motherlode is a testimony of finely tuned poems that vibrate with aliveness-to-the-present and that will break your heart… Dark’s latest collection is an exemplar of her craft , a practice of painstakingly generous attentiveness. For all the anguish, avoidable suffering, petty and systemic violences it records, it pulsates with such love…"
-Lucy Aphramor, Author of Raise the Roof!, Co-author of Body Respect
-Laura Apol, author of Cauterized, former Poet Laureate of Lansing, Michigan
“In Motherlode Kimberly Dark boldly confronts the myth of the loving mom, giving voice instead to those of us who survived mothers who couldn’t or wouldn’t love us. Dark gives readers a necessary window into survival, uneasy truces, acceptance, and self-protection. These poems are at once deeply personal and profoundly relatable for any of us who have had brutal parents, dealt with their aging, and had to decide how involved (or not) we would be. Most of all, Dark gives a roadmap for weaving self protection and self-love in difficult times while mothering ourselves the way many mothers failed to do. ”
- Sassafras Patterdale, author of Kicked Out, Lost Boi
“Motherlode is a loadstar for women who have carried too much for too long. Arranging and de-arranging a mother-daughter relationship, fraught with difficulty, blessed with micro graces, these poems vibrate, accumulate, reverberate like a heart beating for all its worth. In the end, this beautiful poem-scape seems to suggest, we are all coming home, back into the everything, from which we were born. A heart song. An umbilical to grace.”
-Lidia Yuknavitch, bestselling author of Chronology of Water, and Thrust
“Motherlode brilliantly unburdens and unsettles the impossible expectations of not only how we relate to our mother, but also how we write and think about that relationship. With beautiful and powerful language that simultaneously soothes and sears with its truths, Dark invites us to probe gently at the way we show up when things, bodies, and memories fall apart… This is the book I didn’t know I needed to heal my own relationship with my mother." -L. Ayu Saraswati., author of Scarred: A Feminist Journey Through Pain.
“Dark’s collection is a bold and beautiful meditation on imperfect mothers, mothering, and motherhood through aging and dementia and ultimately, love. These poems do not flinch as they detail the ways we are asked tooled our bodies and expectations to a culture that disciplines anyone that refuses to fit into neat categories of mother and daughter.”
-Sandra L. Faulkner, Author of Poetic Inquiry: Craft, Method, and Practice
"Motherlode is a testimony of finely tuned poems that vibrate with aliveness-to-the-present and that will break your heart… Dark’s latest collection is an exemplar of her craft , a practice of painstakingly generous attentiveness. For all the anguish, avoidable suffering, petty and systemic violences it records, it pulsates with such love…"
-Lucy Aphramor, Author of Raise the Roof!, Co-author of Body Respect