The Unreliable Tree: Poems

A luminous poetry collection that weaves together nature, family ties, and memory

Born from a state of fragmented time, the poems in The Unreliable Tree call out the intimate feelings mothers so often fear to share. With a precise and tender eye, Margot Kahn tracks her early years of parenthood alongside the seasons of her family’s orchard. As she chronicles the changes in her marriage, her friendships, and her own shifting identity, Kahn questions the risks we take for devotion and the labors we devote to love. These poems shine a light on the patience and perseverance required to care--for homes, for people, for heritage--and ultimately question the choices we make: to hold on to others around us, and to hold on to ourselves. Compassionate, unflinching, lyric, and raw, The Unreliable Tree portrays the world of early motherhood with humility and complicated beauty.

MARGOT KAHN is the author of the biography Horses That Buck and coeditor of two essay anthologies, This Is the Place and Wanting. Her poems have appeared in New England Review, The Kenyon Review, The Hopkins Review, and elsewhere. She lives in the Pacific Northwest with her family.