The Good Poetic Mother by Irene Hoge Smith

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This is a remarkably honest and compelling account of one family’s heartbreaking fragmentation. With masterful prose, Irene Hoge Smith explores this interpersonal splintering in the context of America’s cultural flux. Searching for self-fulfillment, the narrator’s mother leaves her husband and daughters to eventually become the partner of outlaw poet Charles Bukowski, giving birth to his only child. The Bohemian lifestyle of the mother and the 1960s penchant for rebellion ripple throughout the book’s half-century-long narrative. With great candor, Smith shows what it takes to put all the pieces of one’s broken life back together in order to overcome. And to forgive.”
Sue William Silverman, author, How to Survive Death and Other Inconveniences

Irene Hoge Smith has accomplished that most difficult of all writerly tasks: she has created a family memoir that is at once compelling, vivid, suspenseful and spacious. What does it mean to her children when a mother abandons them so she can attempt to realize herself writing poetry? Smith’s account of the impact of her mother’s choice, and of their family life before and after her mother’s departure is frank, empathic, and a gripping read.
Janna Malamud Smith, author of An Absorbing Errand: How Artists and Craftsmen Make Their Way to Mastery

Irene Hoge Smith’s The Good Poetic Mother charts the profound journey she has undertaken to unravel the complicated strands of feeling regarding the wild, talented, difficult mother who abandoned her as a child. Beautifully written and deeply wise, this memoir also represents a striving with memory and self, as well as with a woman always beyond reach.
David H. Lynn, Editor Emeritus of the Kenyon Review

Irene Hoge Smith’s moving memoir, The Good Poetic Mother, is a daughter’s excavation—through letters, journals, poems, visits, and “hazy” memory—to unearth the complex, self-described “delicately balanced” woman who left her four young daughters so she could live “loose on my own.” And though at one point Smith realizes “I was seeking not a story, but a mother,” in this deeply realized narrative, she ends up finding both. The Good Poetic Mother is a testament to the enduring hunger for familial connection and a journey into the landscape of forgiveness.
Rebecca McClanahan, author of In the Key of New York City and The Tribal Knot

Irene Hoge Smith’s The Good Poetic Mother combines a poignant family memoir with a truly remarkable human mystery, all of it told with clarity and compassion. Though the mother-daughter relationship at the heart of this story seems shattered beyond repair, Smith shows us that redemption is always possible. A fascinating, essential, and heartening journey.
Dinty W. Moore, author of Between Panic and Desire