Book of the Week – Grandmother’s Milk by Penny Harter

Grandmother’s Milk by Penny Harter is a collection that moves through the body as an archive of memory, inheritance, sexuality, motherhood, illness, and loss. Published in 1995, the book gathers poems that are intimate without being confessional, grounding experience in the physical while allowing it to resonate outward.

The opening poem, “Keeping Time,” sets the tone by linking memory with the body:

Suppose time is my body,
a union of cells gone out
still broadcasting their lust… 

Time is not abstract but cellular, carried forward through sensation and repetition. The poem establishes one of the book’s central concerns: how the body remembers what the mind cannot hold steadily.

In “Skeletal Sex,” Harter turns toward mortality and desire:

Skeletons
know how to do it. 

The starkness of the opening line collapses the divide between life and death. What follows is bones remembering warmth, loneliness, and movement, suggesting that desire persists beyond flesh, or perhaps originates deeper than it.

Motherhood enters with both tenderness and unease. In “First Milk”:

He took the nipple eagerly…
I felt the milk go out of me, go out
until the hardness of my breasts went slack… 

The act of feeding becomes both connection and depletion. The body gives but also empties. Harter does not romanticise motherhood; she lets its physicality remain visible.

Loss and fear take sharper form in “The Dreams of Loss”:

She could have been raped,
sold on the baby market,
never found in a ditch. 

The poem moves through imagined violence with unsettling directness. The fear is not symbolic; it is immediate, maternal, and relentless. The dream becomes indistinguishable from waking anxiety.

Later, in the title poem “Grandmother’s Milk,” inheritance expands across generations:

I sucked out that milk.
“Spit it in the dirt,” my mother said. 

The moment is both intimate and uncomfortable. Milk becomes a conduit of lineage, but also of unease, something to be taken in and then rejected. The final image of “mouthfuls of unswallowed milk / settling into the dust” carries memory into the earth itself.

Midway through reading, you may begin to notice how often the body appears not as a stable self but as a site of passage, with milk, blood, breath, and touch moving through it. Toward the end of the book, consider which of these moments feels most immediate to you: the giving, the remembering, the fearing, or the letting go? And why does one linger longer than the others?

What holds the collection together is its refusal to separate physical experience from emotional or historical weight. Birth carries death within it. Desire carries loneliness. Care carries exhaustion.

Grandmother’s Milk insists on closeness to the body, to memory, to what is passed down and what cannot be kept.

You can read the entire collection in the THF Digital Library. As you explore it, notice how the poems carry memory through the body and where that memory settles for you.

Do you have a full-length or chapbook-length book published in 2021 or earlier that you would like featured as a Book of the Week? Contact us for details. Haiku featured in the Book of the Week Archive are selected by the THF Digital Librarian, Vidya Premkumar and are used with permission.