Every Needful Thing

Every Needful Thing is a collection of essays and poems about a girl, a mother, a woman, a Mormon once-insider-now-outsider. The collection wrestles with uncertainty in identity, role, responsibility, and survival. Every Needful Thing can function in two parts, each in respect to a kind of care. In the first part, what bubbles to the surface is the narrator's/speaker's mindfulness of gender expectations--taking particular care to overextend herself and emphasize abnegation and submission in her movement through the world. In the second part, she emphasizes parenthood as a way of living. Devotion is a central tenet in each part. Heavily fragmented and braided, Every Needful Thing relies on accumulation to push meaning beyond what appears in any one particular section, in any one line. It's an attempt at alchemy: mess into bounty.