• Age: 16
• Grade: 11

After reading this collection, you will never look at mothers - at the playground, at the elementary school, or across the kitchen table - in quite the same way again. Beginning with a poem of pregnancy, written by her twenty-five year old self, Joanne Arnott leads us through a span of twenty years of inward- and outward-facing struggles, centred firmly in the ongoing work of becoming a mother.

Living on the thresholds between races - the poet is a prairie-born Métis - and between the generations, Arnott articulates the challenges of mothering in heart, body, and mind. Her work involves sometimes abstract, sometimes visceral long and short poems, song and chant. Through visiting and revisiting pregnancy, childbirth, lullabies, and multi-generational rage, the poetry moves from the desperation of survival through to a tender place of clarity. The sexual, the spiritual, and the sociological weave together here to shock, cajole, and ultimately to transform our picture of the inner life of the mother.

Joanne Arnott (born 16 December 1960 in Winnipeg, Manitoba) is a Canadian Métis writer.Arnott's works are intimate with an activist slant, exploring the issues faced by a mixed-race girl and woman in poverty, the family, danger, love and childbirth. She writes about these topics from personal experience, as a Métis and a mother of six. She has conducted workshops across much of Canada, and in Australia, including a recent series at the Carnegie Centre, sponsored by SFU.She received the Gerald Lampert Award for her 1991 collection of poetry Wiles of Girlhood.Arnott lives in British Columbia with her family. She is a founding member of the Aboriginal Writers Collective West Coast, and The Aunties Collective. She has served on The Writers Union of Canada National Council (2009), The Writers Trust of Canada Authors Committee, and as jury member for the Governor General's Awards/Poetry (2011).

Joanne Arnott's profile page

Mother Time: Poems New & Selected

Arnott is the mother of six children spanning two decades in age. The acts of giving birth and mothering have played a huge part in her life, and these poems reflect that experience. This collection of old and new work consists of poems that explore Arnott’s identity, both as a mother and as a Métis woman. Song is an important element in her work – not meaning poems that rhyme, but song as a way of oral telling and of sharing. The work will be of special appeal in schools that meet the needs of young mothers, as the poems focus on pregnancy, birthing and children.

Arnott’s Wiles of Girlhood won the Gerald Lampert Award from the League of Canadian Poets for best first book of poetry.

Caution: Since the book is concerned with mothering and birthing, language describing female genitals is explicit.

Mother Time: Poems New and Selected

Arnott is the mother of six children spanning two decades in age. The acts of giving birth and mothering have played a huge part in her life; these poems reflect that experience. This collection of old and new work consists of poems that explore Arnott’s identity, both as a mother and as a Métis woman. Song is an important element in her work—not meaning poems that rhyme, but song as a way of oral telling and of sharing. The work will be of special appeal in schools that meet the needs of young mothers, as the poems are very specific, with their focus on pregnancy, birthing and children.

Arnott’s Wiles of Girlhoodwon the Gerald Lampert Award from the League of Canadian Poets for best first book of poetry.

Caution: Since the book is concerned with mothering and birthing, language describing female genitals is explicit.