Milk, Alice Kinsella
‘Forthright and spontaneous, Kinsella’s words seem to spill onto the page, dancing between poignant poetry and astute, political ruminations.’
Extraordinary new talent Alice Kinsella brings us a memoir on motherhood – the oldest miracle of time. Milk is made up of unchronological prose that is bound together by a theme in each chapter. The result is a collection of fragments that the reader pieces together in the same way Kinsella does as a first-time mother. Kinsella writes with frightening sensitivity on motherhood, and the tides of contradicting emotions that accompany the inseparable mother/baby dyad.
Notably, Kinsella was born into an Ireland that not long ago sent single pregnant women to asylums. Lingering superstitions of female hysteria haunt modern Irish women – some, in the depths of post-natal depression, question their sanity. And with the harsh placed beside the delicate – a duck egg blue alongside a bruise and a chapter on death alongside thoughts on baby toys – the paradox of raising a baby is tangible.
Forthright and spontaneous, Kinsella’s words seem to spill onto the page, dancing between poignant poetry and astute, political ruminations. Climate change angst also seeps into her mothering, with notions of immorality and the inevitable fact that she cannot protect her child from it all. Her analogy of both the body and the planet as homes in crisis stings with accuracy.
As an intimate, shocking, and cathartic picture of existence in the frame of motherhood, Milk is simply stunning.
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