In Know the Mother, her first collection of flash fiction, Desiree Cooper (two-time Pulitzer nominee at the Detroit Free Press, NPR contributor and 2015 Kresge Artist Fellow) focuses on the daily triumphs and troubles of being a black woman, mother and urban middle-class professional. Like carefully crafted prose poems or the succinct stories of Raymond Carver, Cooper's snapshots capture the currents beneath the calm, the memories behind the "crackling bread, a bowl of boiled turnips, fried fatback." In "Postbellum Love Story," for example, Toya is married to "a shoo-in to become the state's first black US senator... [but] long past the day when she had stopped loving Clarence, she'd found other loves to bind her... their happy children... their sprawling home... her heirloom tomatoes and bright holiday parties... being a revered black family in this sea of white incredulity."
Set in racially charged Detroit, Atlanta and even a military base in Okinawa, Cooper's stories rarely stray into politics, even though they often highlight a racist moment of the black experience. Rather, they primarily focus on motherhood--like the new mother in "Origins of Sacrifice" who can't wait for a "date" with her husband: "just a few hours away from the mewling child, the toe-curling pain of breast-feeding, the smell of sour milk and dirty diapers." And the mother in "The Disappearing Girl," waiting in her minivan at her daughter's private school where "she's the only one with brown eyes and skin to match... a refugee on a hostile shore waiting for an airlift." Each exquisite miniature in Know the Mother provides a mural's worth of life. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.