Hello, everyone, and welcome to Fresh Take from What Fresh Hell Laughing in the Face of Motherhood.

This is Margaret. And this is Amy. Today we're talking to Kate Baer. She is the three-time New York Times

bestselling author of the poetry collections, What Kind of Woman? I hope this finds you well, and

and yet. Her work has also been published in the New Yorker,

Literary Hub, Huffington Post, and The New York Times. Kate is also the mother of four. Her latest

collection is entitled How About Now? Welcome, Kate. Thank you so much for having me. It's such an

honor to be here. I love your poetry. It's deeply personal and deeply relatable.

And how about now is in that same vein.

And it took shape during what you call a season of unexpected change in your life.

So can you tell us a little bit about that time in your life?

This book was actually delayed a year.

I keep saying this and I'll say it again today that I've always been a really late bloomer to

life in so many ways, but this time I was very green and very early to a midlife crisis before I even

turned 40. Hey, congratulations. Thank you. I kind of thought it out of the way. That's kind of the

silver lining here, but I was 39, almost 39, when I went through a whole bunch

of health issues, which really made me face my own mortality. And this book really was born from

that, kind of influenced the shape of it, although, you know, it explores a lot of different themes,

but it's about midlife and specifically facing ourselves and our changing bodies and all the wonderful parts and all the difficult parts.

I think that kind of sums it up.

And you also talk about your transition in motherhood, which is very resonant to me.

You talk about taking off the kind of young mommy hat.

We talk sometimes about like the river is flowing and you're just on the boat and everything's moving fast and it's hard to notice the way things are changing. And you're like, oh, these kids will always need me so much. And then you find yourself with kids who you're like, where are they? I haven't seen them in a while. Talk a little bit about that transition for you and how it affected your writing. Yeah, I have a high

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