Kate Baer: A poet who dreams herself back into a woman

Before the pandemic, when she could afford a babysitter, Kate Baer would write from a Panera Bread near her home in Hummelstown, Pennsylvania, where her favourite staffer, Annemarie, would save her the booth with the power outlet and didn’t mind if she brought her own food.

“I’d order a tea and get out my peanut butter and jelly sandwich,” she said.

Since the pandemic, the 35-year-old mother of four has been working from the Panera parking lot, sitting in her Honda minivan with her laptop propped against the steering wheel, attempting to catch a Wi-Fi signal. Baer wore triple layers, parked in the sun and occasionally blasted the heat to keep her fingers from getting numb.

That is where she wrote “What Kind of Woman,” a poetry collection that topped The New York Times' bestseller list for paperback trade fiction when Harper Perennial released it late last year. It was her first piece of paid writing.

That is also where Baer wrote the first draft of her new book, a collection of “erasure poems” that repurpose the nasty messages she receives about her work, striking out words to create new poems.

A few days ago, on International Women’s Day, she posted one of these poems on Instagram alongside its original message. It was from a “freelance book reviewer” requesting an interview and noting that while her work was well written, it was not the subject matter he would like to read about. “Not unbearable, but also not universal,” he wrote. He offered a suggestion: Perhaps studying some of the classics — Edgar Allan Poe, Thomas Hardy or Henry David Thoreau — would help her make her work more relatable.

Baer took a screenshot of the note and sat at her desk, all three of those men’s books on the shelf behind her, and began to white out his words using a tool on her phone:

“it is / unbearable / the way / we have allowed / what is good / to take / the / shape / of men”

“I guess my message is that this narrative of what is ‘good art’ is tired and no longer up to you,” Baer said in an interview.

It is rare, though not unheard-of, for poets to make the bestseller list with debut work. Rupi Kaur, the wildly popular Instapoet, did it; Amanda Gorman, whose first book comes out in September, may be well on her way. But poetry has, perhaps not surprisingly, seen something of a resurgence in the pandemic, said Jennifer Benka, president and executive director of the Academy of American Poets. “It helps us make sense and make meaning of what we’re experiencing.”

Baer has found her voice within that, but in subject matter that has not traditionally been considered “high art”: raw, conflicted feelings about her body (“Hard to describe / I don’t know how to say / great personality / really pretty face but,” she writes in “Fat Girl”); the comfort, but sometimes agony, of long-term partnership (“You still here? I’m here, too,” she writes in “Marriage as a Death”); the crippling loneliness that comes with motherhood, especially right now, even though you are never actually alone.

“She puts into words what a lot of women won’t say out loud,” said Soraya Chemaly, author of “Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger.”

Those words have resonated with women, many of whom tell her they are coming to poetry for the first time. In a year in which all people, but perhaps especially mothers, are grasping for words to express their exhaustion and anger, in Baer they have found someone to say it for them — and in snippets short enough that they actually have time to read a piece in its entirety.

“I discovered her work in the pandemic,” said Imani Payne, who works in human resources in San Francisco. “I still didn’t have child care; I was at home with my husband and our 2-year-old, both of us trying to work full time. It was just like everything that you read about — the chaos of trying to manage all of that. And then I got her book, immediately sat down, and I found myself in tears, poem after poem.”

Baer grew up on Amish romance novels and YM magazine, the daughter of an elementary school teacher and a meatpacking plant worker turned Christian radio host, about 40 minutes outside of Philadelphia. A high school teacher introduced her to the work of Margaret Atwood, still her favourite writer. “It was like a gateway drug,” Baer said.

She went on to study English — “a pretty useless major,” she joked — at Eastern Mennonite University, in Harrisonburg, Virginia, and met her husband, also a graduate of the school, soon after. She spent most of her 20s working odd jobs: as an administrator at a dentist’s office and then a music school, as a nanny, in the IT lab of her alma mater. Of the latter, she said, “Basically, my job was to say, ‘You should restart your computer.’”

During a particularly desperate period, Baer said, she cleaned the homes of hoarders who had died (she found the job on Craigslist) — which was bad, but not as bad as cleaning dorm rooms, which she also did for a time.

Baer was 27 and seven months pregnant with her first child when she was laid off from her job at a nonprofit. Her husband had just enrolled in medical school. “We were already living on loans. We had no money, and child care was so expensive, so I just decided I was going to stay home,” she said.

Home with one child, then two, then three — and then four, the result of a pregnancy she learned of two weeks before her husband was scheduled to have a vasectomy.

Baer was happy but unfulfilled. She began writing emails to friends, which became a blog about motherhood, with subjects such as body image, her struggle with postpartum depression and her desire for something more mixed in. She wrote chapter titles for imaginary books, such as “Spousal Chewing: A Survivor’s Guide” and “Childbirth, Postpartum Poo And Sex After Vaginal Massacre: A Love Story.” (To pay for the babysitter so she could write, she edited resumes for $10 an hour, and an erotic novel about pioneer women.)

“Mommy blogging” was popular at that time, and Baer was seemingly thriving at it. But there was always an undertone: “Serious” writers didn’t write about “mom stuff.” So she decided to step back. She began working on a novel, a thriller about a group of women who become entangled in one another’s lives “in the vein of Gillian Flynn,” she said.

Four years into that novel, Baer began “cheating with poetry,” as she put it. It was 2019, and she mustered the courage to email her agent: “What if I wrote a book of poetry instead?”

There is a long history of poetry that peels back the layers of womanhood, said Maya Popa, poetry reviews editor at Publisher’s Weekly.

And yet for a long time, said poet Robin Morgan, whose 1972 book, “Monster,” was dubbed an “anthem of the women’s movement,” women who wrote about their inner lives were considered “confessional,” while men were simply “literary.”

“If a woman would use the term ‘dishcloth,’ ‘diaper,’ anything like that, it was considered disgusting,” Morgan said. (She noted that the acceptance letter sent to her for the first poem she ever published, in a literary journal, addressed her as “Mr. Robin Morgan.” She didn’t correct them.)

That has changed, slowly but surely, thanks in part to the internet. Popa noted that the 2019 viral poem by Kim Addonizio, “To the Woman Crying Uncontrollably in the Next Stall,” “spoke unflinchingly” to an experience many women could relate to, as did as Maggie Smith’s “Good Bones,” about trying to gather the enthusiasm to sell your children on the world despite its horrors.

Those horrors have only metastasized in a pandemic. “I have talked to so many people, even in publishing, who have said right now, like, ‘I just can’t read a book,’” said Mary Gaule, Baer’s editor at HarperCollins. “And I think poetry feels like a medicine, for whatever reason.”

For many of Baer’s readers, it is a balm as much as a scream they mustn’t voice out loud (lest the children overhear it).

“Having to deal with Zoom schedules and lunch and snacks and also move forward on your own goals, and dealing with your marriage, and the strain that having kids in the house all the time, the exhaustion of it all — it’s a lot,” said Payne, the mother from San Francisco. “She has captured that frustration so beautifully.”

The frustration, and the anger.

In the poem “Motherload,” Baer writes:

She keeps an office in her sternum, the flat

bone in the center of her chest with all its

urgent papers, vast appointments, lists of

minor things. In her vertebrae she holds more

carnal tasks: milk jugs, rotten plants, heavy-bottomed toddlers in all their mortal rage.

In “Interview with Self,” she asks:

Can I have it all? No. Can I have it all? No. Can I have it all? No.

In “Transfiguration,” she says she dreamed herself into a mother, but when she became her, “I had to / dream her back into a woman.”

“There have been some really low points in this pandemic where I have thought, ‘I can’t take another day of feeling like this,’” Baer said. She was at home, locked in her bedroom, while her kids and the babysitter were downstairs. “But it helps that I know it’s not just me.”