As a woman in the 21st century and a new mom, I know as well as anyone that we still have a long way to go in our collective uphill journey toward gender equality. So, when I read of the success of Kate Baer’s book, And Yet, I felt a sense of hope and validation because it is not easy for a poetry collection to find itself on the New York Times Best Seller List, let alone one with a feminist bent.  The reception of the accessibility of her work gives me a warm and optimistic feeling about poetry’s place in mainstream literature and I know I’m speaking heavily through the lens of my cultural heritage when I say this, but reading Baer’s poems was a lot like enjoying a nice bowl of soup. Hear me out.

To those who don’t cook, putting a soup together may seem mysterious and complicated, something akin to culinary sorcery. Others may insist they don’t care much for soup, or they may only like it when certain weather conditions are present. But for the rest of us avid readers of poetry, er, I mean connoisseurs of soup, it is a form of nourishment, and it is made for feeding the masses. For those of us who have made soup before, we know that it’s an excellent way to take the bits of life that are meager or hard to digest and put them together in such a way that it becomes art. And that’s exactly what Kate Baer does in her collection, And Yet. Baer has found a way to take the bits and pieces of life—child rearing, struggles with weight, the bitter parts of marriage, the unsavory difficulties of being a working mom—and puts them together into something that is so digestible that it fills the reader with what we truly hunger for: something that makes us feel seen. And why the comparison to soup? Well, because these poems are impossibly easy to eat. And becayse afterward you can’t help but feel that it was exactly what you needed.

Consider our landscape in 2024. In this economy, people are working two jobs and standing on their heads while juggling knives just to afford groceries. There are wars and famines and an unstable future where social security may disappear completely in our lifetime. Student loans aren’t going down, and the seas are rising. People are stressed, and they’re busy sucking it up in the name of survival. In their precious relaxation time, what’s to lure them to the world of poetry when they could be tuning out and getting the dopamine hit of the newest streaming series instead? And here, walking into this world-on-fire-dumpster-party-that-none-of-us-wanted-to-attend, is Kate Baer’s book And Yet.

Let me tell you why this book works in a society that has so much work left to do. Baer uses her platform with an already large following due to success from her journalist-turned-novelist days to give a public voice to the intimate hardships that she and so many other women struggle with—from body image, to the aching loneliness of motherhood, to mental health struggles that are invisible because women are just so damn good at developing coping mechanisms that keep us functional while not working well enough to actually eliminate our depression and rage. Baer reminds us in her poem, “How to Be Happy” to:

“call a flower by what it is: a little rage. Remember

her bloom is not performing. Remember before you begin

your big important life”

I envision at least a handful of women reading this collection by the beach on their summer vacations as they take a break from their suburban lives and feeling validated, the part of them that is used to being silenced finally feeling heard for the first time. Maybe some of the poems will go on to spur conversations with their partners or their mothers or their friends. Maybe the poems are so satisfying they get shared so that we can have some real talks about motherhood in Western end-stage-capitalism, so that more women can admit they’ve been screaming on the inside while attending yet another meeting-that-could-have-been-an-email without getting pathologized for it. I think that poetry is so powerful that it has the potential to start a revolution inside every home, but first we have to invite it over for dinner.

The unfortunate reality is, most American households say they are too busy for poetry, so when a collection comes along that has the recipe for succeeding in mainstream culture, it’s an exciting prospect. In recent years, lit mags have found themselves on the endangered species list. And while Instagram poets like Rupi Kaur spurred a brief rise in poetry book sales in 2019, poetry seems to be back on its steady post-industrial decline. I know a distressing number of individuals who say they don’t want to put in the work of pulling apart a poem to distill its meaning, that the mental gymnastics required to analyze poetry and read into the cryptic, less-accessible parts is too tiresome for many. For me, even as a busy mom I can’t relate to the sentiment that poetry requires too much effort from the reader. And I bet if you’re an avid reader of poetry, neither can you. But, in our lives centered around entertainment and convenience, there are so many who do.

So, there may be those critics who will pick up this collection and call it a bit generic or claim that it doesn’t go deep enough into the messy and complex emotions of engaging with being a woman around which her work centers. To them, I say that this is a book that introduces critical concepts for helping women in the 21st be seen and heard, and it does it in such a gentle and nourishing way that even those who aren’t into poetry will read this book from cover to cover. That, my friends, is a literary feat. Personally, I don’t think it is the job of every poem to both introduce and solve all the world’s problems. Instead, I feel that each piece adds to the larger ongoing conversation, like a collection of—stay with me—unique ingredients that can be added to the even bigger soup pot that has in it the key elements that create literature and popular culture.

There is so much room in the literary world for collections like this that can bridge the gap and enter the mainstream. How absolutely fitting that Baer wrote this collection while sitting in her minivan; how descriptive of the creativity and sheer effort still required of women to make room for themselves to simply exist in our society—to have a seat at the table. Baer brings this to our attention in her poem, “Mixup,” where she humorously illustrates the inequities in the realities of men and women as she wonders what would happen if a husband and wife woke up to find their bodies switched, writing:

“except at lunch when she orders fries and no one says

we’re so bad

or at the meeting when she gives the room all her best ideas

and they say man, where have you been?

We have to fix this, the husband begs when the wife returns for dinner.”

If we stop to consider what it may take for a collection of poems  by a woman about women problems (as some of these themes have been called in my home culture) to make it to the top of the New York Times Best Seller list, we may find that generic is a word that can be used to describe much of the other work on that list as well, and maybe that’s precisely the explanation behind their popularity (*dodges the booing crowd throwing tomatoes, letting them land gracefully into the pot of soup simmering behind me*).

So, what I came here to say is this: there is value in a book that is so easy to read it can hardly be put down, that can shed light on a hunger of which society is too busy to notice the rumblings, and which does so beautifully. Baer’s poems do important work, by bringing the plight of women and mothers out of the shadows and into the mainstream. With this book, Baer may have found a perfect recipe for bridging the gap between the literary and mainstream, allowing these pieces to be a gateway to convert some people who may think they don’t like poetry into recognizing they actually hunger for it.

These poems are downright enjoyable. By being accessible, they appeal to readers who may not be all that into poetry, and those readers are a crucial addition to the conversation if we are to see progress. In an era when postpartum depression, anxiety, and psychosis, are finally entering the mainstream and getting their place at the dinner table, I’m here for whatever it takes to get us to talk about it, to make art about it, and to get women the support they need, so that our uncles and neighbors and gosh, partners, and, gasp, policy makers notice the not-so-silent screaming of the many women around them. Because what ails women, ails all of society. I’m here for the conversation to finally get the attention it deserves. I’m here for talking about the sticky messy stuff that gets swept under the rug so repeatedly, that here we are again having the right-to-choose conversation as if our mothers and grandmothers didn’t already burn their bras and wave them around in order to get our attention. I’m here for more bullhorns for women and female poets.

That’s where the soup comes in. Simple or gourmet, it can be the first course, heck, it can even be the main meal. The important thing is that we can roll up our sleeves and get to the messy work of finding satisfaction in a sad and broken, terrifically hungry world. And maybe, someday, we can look forward to dessert.

In Baer’s own words:

“Dr. William Carlos Williams wrote poetry on his

prescription pad to enliven the singularly sterile field

of science and philosophy. I write mine on the backs of

my children. On the inside of my husband’s mouth.

On any of these tame and routine days.”

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Kate Baer is the 3x New York Times bestselling author of What Kind Of Woman, I Hope This Finds You Well, & And Yet. Her work has also been published in The New Yorker, Literary Hub, Huffington Post and The New York Times.

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