@book {gimenez_smith_bring_2010,
	title = {Bring Down the Little Birds: On Mothering, Art, Work, and Everything Else},
	series = {Camino del sol},
	year = {2010},
	note = {OCLC: ocn519826225},
	publisher = {University of Arizona Press},
	organization = {University of Arizona Press},
	address = {Tucson},
	abstract = {
	View eBook @ Harvard Library [HarvardKey required]



	"How does a contemporary woman with a career as a poet, professor, and editor experience motherhood with one small child, another soon to be born, and her own mother suddenly diagnosed with a brain tumor and Alzheimer{\textquoteright}s? The dichotomy between life as a mother and life as an artist and professional is a major theme in modern literature because often the two seem irreconcilable. In Bring Down the Little Birds, Carmen Gim{\'e}nez Smith faces this seeming irreconcilability head-on, offering a powerful and necessary lyric memoir to shed light on the difficulties{\textemdash}and joys{\textemdash}of being a mother juggling work, art, raising children, pregnancy, and being a daughter to an ailing mother, and, perhaps most important, offering a rigorous and intensely imaginative contemplation on the concept of motherhood as such.



	Writing in fragmented yet coherent sections, the author shares with us her interior monologue, affording the reader a uniquely honest, insightful, and deeply personal glimpse into a woman{\textquoteright}s first and second journeys into motherhood. Gim{\'e}nez Smith begins Bring Down the Little Birds by detailing the relationship with her own mother, from whom her own concept of motherhood originated, a conception the author continually reevaluates and questions over the course of the book.



	Combining fragments of thought, daydreams, entries from notebooks both real and imaginary, and real-life experiences, Gim{\'e}nez Smith interrogates everything involved in becoming and being a mother for both the first and second time, from wondering what her children will one day know about her own {\textquotedblleft}secret life{\textquotedblright} to meditations on the physical effects of pregnancy as well as the myths, the nostalgia, and the glorification of motherhood.



	While Gim{\'e}nez Smith incorporates universal experiences of motherhood that other authors have detailed throughout literature, what separates her book from these many others is that her reflections are captured in a style that establishes an intimacy and immediacy between author and reader through which we come to know the secret life of a mother and are made to question our own conception of what motherhood really means."

},
	isbn = {978-0-8165-2869-1},
	url = {http://id.lib.harvard.edu/alma/990126102810203941/catalog},
	author = {Gim{\'e}nez Smith, Carmen}
}
