Lyn Hejinian writes of The Desires of Mothers to Please Others in This is a most remarkable and wonderful book, reinventing the genre of "letters by mothers" and extending it into a brilliant social mediation on the unpredictability and unboundedness of the responsibility we experience as desire. The work is precise, expansive, unabashed, melancholic, forthright, and metaphysical; it is about public and private history, good advice, speculation, news, and the ways understanding and adventure direct our attention and stimulate our manifold desire. "Bernadette" (the one in the book) is at any given point precisely and descriptively somewhere, and yet she is also everywhere; the simultaneity and scale-shifting of her attention as it runs through any given sentence is amazing. And yet the power of the resulting book is logical. For "mothers," the desire to please is always a prolongation of the power to please.
