Male poets and the agon of the mother : contexts in confessional and postconfessional poetry / Hannah Baker Saltmarsh ; foreword by Jo Gill.

Introduction: "At the center of how I think my life": my mother
"And, moreover / my mother says": Robert Lowell, John Berryman, and confessional maternity
"Freaked in the moon brain": Allen Ginsberg and Frank Bidart: confessing crazy mothers
Postconfessional stories: C. K. Williams and Robert Hass on maternal breasts and mouths
"Yellow flowers . . . with mouths like where / babies come from": Yusef Komunyakaa's innuendos, ideas, and insinuations about motherhood
"And all this time I've stayed awake with you": romanticism in Stanley Plumly's maternal metaphor
"I am made by her, and undone": an Anglo-American coda; or, Thom Gunn undone
Conclusion: "You still haven't finished with your mother": men constructing a poetics of motherhood.