Saturday, May 8, 2021

Nine stories about mother-son relationships

Keisha Bush was born and raised in Boston, Massachusetts. She received her MFA in creative writing from The New School, where she was a Riggio Honors Teaching Fellow and recipient of an NSPE Dean’s Scholarship. After a career in corporate finance and international development that brought her to live in Dakar, Senegal, she decided to focus full-time on her writing. She lives in East Harlem.

Bush's new novel is No Heaven For Good Boys.

[My Book, The Movie: No Heaven for Good BoysThe Page 69 Test: No Heaven for Good Boys]

At Electric Lit she tagged nine "books, movies, and albums on the bond between boys and their moms," including:
Mama Phife Represents: A Verse Memoir by Cheryl Boyce-Taylor

A mother grapples with the loss of her son, and reflects on motherhood. In the way Maps is an ode to [John] Freeman’s mother, Mama Phife writes to the son she has lost. “Grief is a dangerous widow,” she states and at one point poses the question, “honey when will the sun return?” In the scarce pages of this epic poem, we come to understand and see the writer’s grief in a way that anyone who has lost a loved one can recognize but may have struggled to put into words, and allows the reader to acknowledge that grief is universal and does not play favorites.
Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue