Mary Kaiser reads “He Dreams a Mother”

Today on Cincinnati RevYouTube, we present Mary Kaiser reading “He Dreams a Mother.” In the words of poetry editor Don Bogen, this piece “is typical of the inventive and intimate ways Mary’s poems engage history. . . . In the summer 2007 issue we published four poems from a book she was doing on the Shakers. We ran another set of Shaker poems in summer 2011. Mary’s particular angle on this group, with their tense celibacy and obsession with mystic visions, takes them well beyond the image of homespun ‘simplicity’ to which they’ve been reduced.” The image shown in the video is of the Center Family Meeting Room in Shaker Village at Pleasant Hill, Kentucky.

On Friday, look for composer David Clay Mettens’s musical rendering of “He Dreams a Mother.”