Endorsements

Drawn from poems written over several years, this book’s dizzying ambition is to plot a path through the life of an adopted child. Foley does so with consummate skill, creating poetic forms to encompass the experiences of the child, her birth mother, her adoptive parents, aunts and midwives. Foley’s language is imagistic, fragmentary, full of jump-cuts, yet always vigorously carried forward through a set of clear-speaking voices to show us that the “DNA of years” is just as formative as that “tangle of parental DNA” we are each born with. There is suffering and lies, grief, distance and disappointment, but her message is ultimately an optimistic one: blood is not thicker than water; we are each of us, to a large extent, creators of ourselves, parents of ourselves. Brilliantly focused and carefully sequenced, these poems provide a thrilling and moving account of the processes by which any of us – adopted or not – become who we are.

Martyn Crucefix

These poems are an absorbing account of the legacy of being an adopted child. With language at once forthright and tender, this moving sequence reflects Foley’s unflinching gaze into the mirror in a sometimes excoriating attempt to discern traces of her belonging, and to make peace with the past. An illuminating must-read for adoptees and their parents, both biological and de facto, and for adoption workers who engage with the precarious task of arranging the exchange of one set of parents with another.

Joy Howard. (Poet, publisher and former Fostering Services Manager).