Inside her husband’s wedding ring, Rishma had inscribed to “my bashert,” meaning to “my destiny” in Yiddish. Up to her last surgery in December, Rishma worked on two writing projects, “Love and Cancer in the Candy Factory,” her memoir, and “Dangerous Words: the Poetry of Witness,” an exploration of the subversive role poets play during the transitional-justice stage of any Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Over the years, five volumes of her poetry were published, including the acclaimed “Reading Like a Girl” and her most recent collection, “Lover Through Departure.” She also edited the anthology “White Ink: Poems on Mother and Motherhood,” and co-edited the seminal “Red Silk: An Anthology of South Asian Women Poets.”

She became a Professor of Creative Writing at York University, as well as a devoted poet. Her parents emigrated to Canada when she was one-year old. Her father, Katar Singh, predeceased her. Nini Singh her sisters, Dr Sonia Singh and Amrita Singh her nephew Darius and niece Celina her uncle Suman and aunty Lena as well as her many colleagues and friends. She shall be missed deeply by her daughters, Cara and Rachel Dunlop her mother, Mrs. Her last words were, “I’m falling, David, falling inside,” as she fell into the world to come.

The use of relational dialectics as a framework demonstrates how relational communication theory can contribute to critical work.Rishma died peacefully on Sunday evening, April 17th, at home in the arms of her beloved husband, David Sobelman.

In this essay, we place the poems in the context of mothering discourses and argue that they both speak to and broaden notions of confessional poetics by refuting public private binaries and thus, transform totalizing mothering discourses. By framing communication as a dialectic between the relational and political, we make the connection between mothering, poetry and politics explicit. We analyzed the anthology, Not for Mothers Only: Contemporary Poems on Child Getting and Child–Rearing (Wagner & Wolff, 2007), from a relational dialectics framework to focus attention on the interplay between dominant and marginalized discourses circulating about mothering in the collected poems. Poetry about mothering, child-rearing, child-getting, the meanings and experiences of mom-mother-mothering, speaks to larger issues of mothering as contested spaces of social change.

Reading Like A Girl by Rishma Dunlop