"MOTHER!" by Summer Stewart, Tears Into the Systems That Raise Women to Disappear
Portland, OR, May 12, 2026 --(PR.com)-- Unsolicited Press announces the release of "MOTHER!," a hybrid collection of poetry and essays by Summer Stewart that interrogates how women are shaped by expectation, inheritance, religion, labor, and performance long before they recognize the roles being assigned to them.
Part literary excavation, part reckoning, "MOTHER!" moves through girlhood, religion, sexuality, labor, partnership, and motherhood as sites of ongoing construction. The collection resists the fantasy of the self-made woman. Instead, it traces the quieter, more brutal realities of becoming: the inherited rules, the performances of obedience, the negotiations of survival, and the invisible pressures that shape identity in the body over time.
Stewart’s writing is both intimate and unsparing. These pieces examine what it means to grow up inside environments where silence is rewarded, care becomes labor, and femininity is often defined through usefulness rather than autonomy. Across poems and essays, "MOTHER!" returns again and again to the tension between who a woman is expected to become and who she might have been otherwise…and what happens when she pushes against the walls of her box.
The collection rejects neat categories. Poetry fractures into narrative and essays turn lyrical, volatile, and embodied. Memory collides with cultural critique. In pieces such as “Growing Up Without a Mother,” “Rules for Arguing with Men Who Think They’re Progressive,” and “The Credibility Gap,” Stewart exposes the mechanics of power operating beneath everyday life: inside families, institutions, and even the language women are taught to use about themselves.
At the center of "MOTHER!" is the question of transformation. What does it mean to become a mother while still trying to understand the girl you were taught to abandon? What happens when womanhood itself has been shaped through expectation, sacrifice, performance, and silence? Rather than offering resolution, Stewart stays inside the instability of those questions, allowing contradiction, rage, tenderness, and reinvention to coexist.
Summer Stewart is an award-winning journalist, poet, and the founder of Unsolicited Press, an independent publishing house based in Portland, Oregon. For more than a decade, she has worked at the intersection of writing and publishing, championing independent literature while contributing to broader conversations around power, labor, gender, and literary culture.
"MOTHER!" is available through Unsolicited Press and distributed by Asterism Books.
Book Details
Title: MOTHER!
Author: Summer Stewart
Publisher: Unsolicited Press
Publication Date: May 8, 2026
ISBN: 978-1-963115-43-7
Price: $19.95
Distribution: Asterism Books
Part literary excavation, part reckoning, "MOTHER!" moves through girlhood, religion, sexuality, labor, partnership, and motherhood as sites of ongoing construction. The collection resists the fantasy of the self-made woman. Instead, it traces the quieter, more brutal realities of becoming: the inherited rules, the performances of obedience, the negotiations of survival, and the invisible pressures that shape identity in the body over time.
Stewart’s writing is both intimate and unsparing. These pieces examine what it means to grow up inside environments where silence is rewarded, care becomes labor, and femininity is often defined through usefulness rather than autonomy. Across poems and essays, "MOTHER!" returns again and again to the tension between who a woman is expected to become and who she might have been otherwise…and what happens when she pushes against the walls of her box.
The collection rejects neat categories. Poetry fractures into narrative and essays turn lyrical, volatile, and embodied. Memory collides with cultural critique. In pieces such as “Growing Up Without a Mother,” “Rules for Arguing with Men Who Think They’re Progressive,” and “The Credibility Gap,” Stewart exposes the mechanics of power operating beneath everyday life: inside families, institutions, and even the language women are taught to use about themselves.
At the center of "MOTHER!" is the question of transformation. What does it mean to become a mother while still trying to understand the girl you were taught to abandon? What happens when womanhood itself has been shaped through expectation, sacrifice, performance, and silence? Rather than offering resolution, Stewart stays inside the instability of those questions, allowing contradiction, rage, tenderness, and reinvention to coexist.
Summer Stewart is an award-winning journalist, poet, and the founder of Unsolicited Press, an independent publishing house based in Portland, Oregon. For more than a decade, she has worked at the intersection of writing and publishing, championing independent literature while contributing to broader conversations around power, labor, gender, and literary culture.
"MOTHER!" is available through Unsolicited Press and distributed by Asterism Books.
Book Details
Title: MOTHER!
Author: Summer Stewart
Publisher: Unsolicited Press
Publication Date: May 8, 2026
ISBN: 978-1-963115-43-7
Price: $19.95
Distribution: Asterism Books
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Unsolicited Press
S.R. Stewart
619-354-8005
www.unsolicitedpress.com
S.R. Stewart
619-354-8005
www.unsolicitedpress.com
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