Hagar raises her son across an unwelcoming border. Bathsheba tries to erase her trauma. Another breakup haunts the woman at the well. The poems in Birthmarks contemporize women of the Old and New Testaments and consider who they might be today. Drawing on history, subtext, and common female experiences, they reimagine these characters and their narratives, daring readers to meet the women of the Bible anew.
“Whitney Rio-Ross’s poetry emerges out of what may be the single most damaging silence in the history of Christianity: the voices of women. The songs and speeches she has teased out of those silences are complex, moving, necessary—and now unforgettable.”
—Christian Wiman, poet and essayist, author of My Bright Abyss
“There is poetry and then there is poetry. Whitney Rio-Ross’s Birthmarks—right from the dedication—belongs in that latter category. Her poems are midrashic, attending with adoringly inquisitive and exquisitely irreverent attention to the bodies and stories of our biblical mothers, and reading these lines we cannot help but come aware of our own bodies and our own stories. This is the kind of attention that leaves a mark.”
—Chris Green, Professor of Theology, Southeastern University