Protection

by Michelle Lerner

Scheduled Release Date: July 15, 2021

In Protection, Michelle Lerner explores the wonder and challenges of parenting from pregnancy through early childhood, taking on subjects rarely considered in poetry such as difficult labor, c-section, questions of gender identity and development in young children, and the experience of parenting while chronically ill. Throughout the chapbook, she comes back, over and over, to the eternal dilemma of how to balance the urge to protect one’s child with the acknowledgement of the child’s need for self-development and risk-taking, how to distinguish “the you from the me/ the definition from destruction/ the stumble from the fall.”

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Michelle Lerner’s debut chapbook Protection is a breathtaking poetic journey of pregnancy and motherhood.  I love Lerner’s luminous imagery that fuses at times with an unexpected searing irony. There is an originality of subject matter and candor dealing with exploring gender identity of children that reinforces this author’s openness and intelligence. Her poem “House” may be the fiercest and most tender poem about pregnancy I’ve ever read.  Michelle Lerner is a new shimmering star on our poetry planet.

—Laura Boss, author of The Best Lover, editor of Lips

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