<p>Mouths Open to Name Her, Katie Bickham&#39;s dazzling new collection, resounds with the intensity of new motherhood and confronts the relationship between mothers and their children, as she explores what it means to carry a child, even one conceived by rape or 'a child born from no place, from the flame of her forgetting, / bracket of blank pages. The boy, too, was destined to forget-- / a bird from no tree branch, fish from no river, sword from no forge.' Moving from the mid-1800s to 2017, these finely wrought poems grapple with how war, violence, and enslavement can disrupt our innocence. Bickham emphasizes the power of creation in spite of this: 'Just picture them all,' she writes, '350,000 babies, together at once, / a city&#39;s worth of them in a row or a circle or wrapped / in an acres-wide blanket, an army of innocence yawning / their first breaths over the globe, and the promise / that it will all happen again, just like this, just as imperfectly, / no matter what, / tomorrow.' Mouths Open to Name Her calls forth a global sisterhood that extends from Charleston, South Carolina, and Shreveport, Louisiana, to Nice, France; Buenos Aires, Argentina; and the Serengeti District, Tanzania.</p>