Mother Tongue

Author: Chaelee Dalton Publisher: Gold Line Press (2021) A poetry collection meets cookbook, Mother Tongue celebrates the recipe as a testament to women’s labor and communal care, transmitted and transformed across borders and generations. Dalton uses the recipe form to trace their return to a mother and nation they have never known, and to evoke the simultaneous intimacy and distance they feel embodied in their family histories. While Mother Tongue centers on a personal experience of transnational adoption, in doing so, it illuminates a greater collective sense of hunger and mourning embedded within global frameworks of food, consumption, and connection. “In Mother Tongue, Chaelee Dalton trains their exacting eye and lyricism to capture the multiple sites of disruption and rupture that exist when one is born in one country and then adopted into another. In Dalton's case, those countries are South Korea and the United States, and they move deftly through the permeable boundaries of ge