A note about the work "There were no poets of motherhood," from Leah Falk for the Michigan Quarterly Review's Summer 2025 issue: Motherhood has animated my poems since I became pregnant with my first daughter in 2019, but in this poem I return to a memory from before I had children, when motherhood was still an abstraction. After graduating from college, I worked in a bookstore near a prestigious university, and it was there that a well-known scholar and critic contended that there were “no poets of motherhood.” The claim seemed absurd to me even then, since I had been reading contemporary poets like Kim Addonizio, Rita Dove, Lucille Clifton, Rachel Zucker, and so many others who use their motherhood as a touchstone. My memory of her talk was among the first in which I realized that I could have an opinion that differed from someone so senior, and have evidence for it, too. In this poem I explore the imagined boundaries some might erect between scholarly and artistic pursuits and domestic and menial work, and what the cost of such borders might be to both art and labor.