"What is the difference, asks Martha Rhodes, between forgetting and being forgotten? Why do our most primal images of self-definition - the house, the childhood bedroom, the mother's body - become more vaporous the more we speak? The poems of "Mother Quiet" don't just ask these questions; they inhabit these questions...'The inside of her mouth was black and airless,' says Rhodes of the dead mother, and the image is at once a poet's blessing and a poet's curse. Weird, dark, hilarious, direct, otherworldly - these poems display a poet in command of every note the English language is capable of sounding. They will not be silenced: they are unforgettable." - James Longenbach, author of "Fleet River and Modern Poetry after Modernism".