Undersight by Alison Hurwitz
Bottlecap Press, 2026
In her powerful first chapbook, Undersight, Alison Hurwitz skillfully portrays the sometimes overlooked, often misunderstood experience of mothers of neurodivergent children. She notices her son:
… Sometimes,
he’s a stray dog barking in a red bandana,
and sometimes he’s a ricochet of many marching feet.… Sometimes,
he’s the painter dotting canvasses with paint.…. If we could only show you
the whole picture: wait long enough and look—our son
becomes a multitude of colors. Shadow and light.
A boat on summer water. A parasol.
Hurwitz does give us “a multitude of colors”—brilliant and on display. Both “shadow and light,” her poems are awash with singing, one son’s voice “a liquid kind of light” in one piece. In another, “music takes [her] to a clearing / where the curve of water holds the sky.” In a third, song allows “tightness…to slacken.” Each poem is wonderfully tactile. There is “a wonder-gallop in his skin,” she tells us, and “an itch inside his head.”
The poems showcase her child’s keen perceptions. In the piece “In the Butterfly House,” for example, Hurwitz observes her son’s heightened sensitivity to sound while also recognizing his insight and longing.
My son cannot understand why
other visitors won’t whisper.
How could they enter and
not see the cathedral?…
I know that ache of being close but never near enough
to catch what flutters in periphery—
the winged shape, the moment:
that trembled resonance of light.
In another poem, “the mess, he says, is far too loud… the crunch of crumpled paper… [t]he way no single sound retreats / or blends.” This, too, the poet-mother approaches with empathy, understanding, and, fortunately for us, through the lens of poetry. Master of many forms—sestina, pantoum, erasure, Golden Shovel, haibun, free verse, etc.—Hurwitz allows her readers to enter anew rooms familiar to many, but especially to those who are neurodivergent: a different way of feeling time, randomness increased by anxiety, frequent distractions.
Hurwitz is not the only mother who has asked the hard question, “What do I carry in my blood?” It can be a painful query without easy answers. However, I suspect that readers of Undersight will agree with me. What this poet carries in her blood are strong insight, sharp intellect, commanding talent, and deep love. Clearly, Hurwitz strives “to learn [her children] not as bird’s eye / flight and curved horizon… [but with a desire] to find an undersight / below the loam… [to] learn [them] / as a sightless fish learns water.” May we all be thus blessed.
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Marjorie Maddox has published 17 collections of poetry—most recently Hover Here and Seeing Things—5 children’s books, and two anthologies: Common Wealth and Keystone Poetry. She is the Poetry Moment host for WPSU-FM, assistant editor of Presence, and Professor Emerita at Commonwealth University. Her YA biography is A Man Named Branch: The True Story of Baseball’s Great Experiment (Sunbury Press).