Thank you for visiting the website of Samantha Kolber, poet and editor in Montpelier, Vermont. Read some poems, buy a book (available after September 1st) and keep supporting poetry!
About Birth of a Daughter
Release Date: Sept. 1, 2020
42 pages / 6 x 9 / ISBN: 9781952326363 / $16.00
Distribution for the book trade:
Ingram and Kelsay Books
About the book
Gold Winner in Realistic Poetry, 2021 Human Relations Indie Book Awards
Poetry Winner, 2023 San Francisco Book Festival
5-Star Readers’ Favorite
With raw honesty and lyrical language, Samantha Kolber’s debut chapbook (small book) explores the physical and emotional transformations a woman experiences on the journey to motherhood, exposing the disappearing, artistic self among the chaos and anxiety of pregnancy complications, birth, wakeful nights, breastfeeding, postpartum depression, and parenting, while also exploring the complex relationship of being a motherless daughter. Poems in Birth of a Daughter range from meticulously crafted to experimental prose and are accessible to everyone.
Advance praise
“In Birth of a Daughter, Samantha Kolber deftly reveals the private world of pregnancy and birth—the middle of the night and light of day worries about safety, connection, and intimacy, weighing what shifts, writing, ‘I am marked. I am one becoming two, becoming one / again…my body deceives me.’ Indeed, these poems are brave in their accounting of the pregnant, birthing body and the realities of mothering, the territory we enter—‘oh, these worlds we are now / you and I.’ Dailiness and milestones merge here, bringing us on a journey that is part emotional travelogue, part wonder, part weighing of generations and of our times, and part arrival at the precise awareness that, ‘I am witness. I am mother.’ Kolber’s voice is an important one, honoring what is often kept hidden.”
— Kerrin McCadden, author of Keep This to Yourself
“In her startling, beautiful new collection, Birth of a Daughter, Samantha Kolber pulls us into the time-out-of-time experience of pregnancy and motherhood. Alert to the expanded ‘porous’ boundaries of both body and self, Kolber writes with intimate, visceral authority: ‘I am / clearly awake.’ Like salt-water pearls, these raw, gorgeous poems glow, capturing the wild internal variations felt just holding a new child or toddler in your arms, exhausted and exhilarated. ‘I am me plus and minus the cells expunged to create you, daughter,’ Kolber writes, ever-attuned to the possibility of artistic sublimation to the hunger of her infant daughter. This collection affirms Kolber’s territorial claim to the mother-as-artist: ‘sucking what light I make / into the core of you / oh, these worlds we are now.’”
— Megan Buchanan, author of Clothesline Religion
“Birth of a Daughter is an honest and vivid portrait of new motherhood. It is a chapbook about intimacy and love, both for the child and for the self. ‘There is a world at my fingertips. / Or, I am the world — fingertipped' Kolber writes in her poem ‘A(u)reola.’ These poems are a beautiful witness to that common, yet utterly profound occurrence of birth.”
—Bianca Stone, author of The Mobius Strip Club of Grief and A Little Called Pauline