“This is a female text, composed while folding someone else’s clothes. My mind holds it close, and it grows, tender and slow, while my hands perform innumerable chores.”

 ~ Doireann Ní Ghríofa, A Ghost in the Throat

A Ghost in the Throat, by award-winning poet and essayist Doireann Ní Ghríofa, is a book I highly recommend for its insightful prose that flows seamlessly between memoir, poetic verse, and historical inquiry. It tells the story of turbulent motherhood and Ní Ghríofa’s compulsive re-envisioning of an eighteenth-century woman, Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, all but erased by history.