A box of books with primary and navy blue covers lies open on a rug. The image on the book shows a tattooed shoulder with an image of DNA.

MONSTER is a series of meditations on caregiving in poetry and lyric prose as a mother adapts to her son’s disabilities and complex needs: her wrestling match with caregiving’s rigors, the biases of ableism, and her growing understanding of science. Stone subverts tired movie stereotypes about Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and questions received ideas about caregiving's "burdens” through essays and poems that disrupt ableist constructs, examine the nature of motherhood, and explore the ramifications of genetics. For example, the evolutionary purpose of DNA is to make each of us different, diverse, unique—our genomes are the ultimate shape-shifters.

The root of the word “monster” is the Latin verb “monere” (to warn) and “monstrum” (portent, prodigy, among others). Mary Shelley’s warning in her original text? That humanity is too eager to “other” those who are different, and reluctant to examine its own prejudices about beauty and nonconformity. Monsters may be depicted as warnings, but the term has also come to signify something awesome, extraordinary, or amazing.

MONSTER was issued in 2016 by Phoenicia Publishing, an independent press based in Montreal.

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PRAISE FOR MONSTER

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Photo: B. Farbo

A Middlebury Magazine Fall 2017 editors' pick, "Weaving poetry, essays, and stories in a moving and intelligent voice, Jeneva Burroughs Stone ’86 draws us in to the difficult yet poignant life she has taking care of her disabled son. Part meditation, part intellectual observation, and full of love, her story not only reflects what it means to be family but what it means to be human."

Eleanor Wilner (Tourist in Hell, 2010, & six other books; MacArthur Fellowship, 1991): "Interpreter of 'the kid behind the curtain of my voice,' the passionate intellect of Jeneva Stone drives these mesmerizing reflections--memoir, meditation, original creation--when 'what happens breaks covenant with every explanation in its path,' as she watches 'a world shatter like ice.' These pages astonish with their continual inquiry, their candor, their sophisticated knowledge of science and literature, their metaphoric accrual of meanings--astonishing, the forms that love and brilliance can conjure out of chaos."

Sarah Manguso (Ongoingness, 2015; The Two Kinds of Decay, 2008; Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize Fellowship, 2007):"Stone begins, 'I fear love will be the force that breaks me.' It is, and it does, and she shows us what it is like to continue after that breakage. Her roving mind processes scientific research, the work of other writers, and the events of her days, and makes of these raw materials a 'monstrous' book of verse and prose, a testament to broken continuance. Everyone who is interested in life should bear witness to Stone's searching and scrupulous report on her son, sentenced by a genetic mutation to a life of extreme constraint, a life of almost pure being. It is the very definition of love."

Elizabeth Aquino (Hope for a Sea Change, 2014): "Jeneva Burroughs Stone's 'Monster' does what seems impossible--weaves together the threads of creating and caring for a child with significant disabilities with those of poetry, intricate intellectual observation and, above all, love and wonder for what is wrought."


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