by Chaelee Dalton (이채연)

 

 

ISBN: 978-1-938900-36-5
Publication date: July 2021
50 pages, 5.3” x 7”
Read Press Release (PDF)

 

SYNOPSIS

A poetry collection meets cookbook, Mother Tongue celebrates the recipe as a testament to women’s labor and communal care, transmitted and transformed across borders and generations. Dalton uses the recipe form to trace their return to a mother and nation they have never known, and to evoke the simultaneous intimacy and distance they feel embodied in their family histories. While Mother Tongue centers on a personal experience of transnational adoption, in doing so, it illuminates a greater collective sense of hunger and mourning embedded within global frameworks of food, consumption, and connection.

EXCERPT

From “Poem of Poems”
 
Before the recipe book, daughters learned to
cook from their mothers, standing
shoulder to shoulder in the kitchen
 
with the orange stain of chili powder,
the fresh burn of garlic. We do not know
how old this type of knowledge is:
 
the kind that reproduces itself. Before the
recipe, we had only poems and bodies
to remember.
 
 
What our ancestors buried: what is a grave
and what is a garden. My mother will
never know what I am
 
looking for: the imprint of her knees
pressed into the soil. The way
she teaches me how to cultivate life.
 
Born either a mistake or a miracle, I know
I am an impatient gardener
and a bad daughter.
 
 
We are scared of becoming our mothers
because we do not know them and
we are scared of forgetting ourselves.
 
My mother often reminds me what I do not
know: what it feels like to be a mother.
But maybe I will
 
someday understand. When and/or if.
She remembers: to be a daughter
is to be bad by definition.

PRAISE

“In Mother Tongue, Chaelee Dalton trains their exacting eye and lyricism to capture the multiple sites of disruption and rupture that exist when one is born in one country and then adopted into another. In Dalton’s case, those countries are South Korea and the United States, and they move deftly through the permeable boundaries of geography, culture, and (double) daughterhood, capturing the nuances of how a body is both at home and not at home… As someone who didn’t ‘learn how to cook from [their] mothers,’ Dalton navigates unknown territory by way of intuition: via taste, via song. This is no mere book of recipes, no collection of poems that I have ever encountered before: what Dalton captures are the tense and inexplicable ways in which we are entangled by genetic, socio-cultural, and familial ties. What they offer is a reckoning, an indelible one.”

Diana Khoi Nguyen

2019 Gold Line Press Poetry Chapbook Contest Judge

“These fiercely tender poems in Mother Tongue  have an undeniable alchemy: the yearning made beautiful by giving it a name, the map that can be drawn only by staring into the abyss. Longing and desire are poignantly intertwined into the craft of each of these poems, leaving behind both a familiar hunger and the relief of discovering a compass that points towards home, even when it is a constantly moving target… Chaelee, with fearlessness and compassion, writes the speaker into a history that was taken from them. This collection is an unforgettable offering of ‘what our ancestors buried: what is a grave and what is a garden.’”

Arhm Choi Wild

Author of Cut to Bloom

 

 

AUTHOR

Chaelee Dalton (이채연) is a Korean-American adoptee, poet, and educator. With homes in Uijeongbu, South Korea, and Anacortes, Washington, Chaelee currently lives in New York.

 

DESIGNER

Book design by Kenji C. Liu.

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