At The Table With Your Mother (chapbook)

The cover of the collection designed by Little.

At The Table With Your Mother is a short chapbook published on Tumblr in 2016 by Matthew Little.[1]

Background

At The Table With Your Mother consists of seven different poems ranging various topics. Little began the collection during a night in June 2016 while taking a break from writing his novel, Boss. Little claims he had a "random burst of creativity" and started writing the collection by completing four of the poems in one night. The entirety of the chapbook took him several weeks to write, on and off.

Style and subject matter

The collection can be considered an example of Alt lit. Little explained on his personal Tumblr blog the reason why the poems were written as they were:

"I barely edited them; they’re all free thought poems, meaning they are all from the top of my head with not much thought given to them. I wanted to try a more post-modern approach, and try a different route than the traditionalist one I usually take."[2]

Instead of using Google Docs as his medium, as Little does with a majority of his writing, he wrote each of the seven poems using Microsoft Paint. They appear rectangular over a white background in a large, bold Baskerville Old Face font.

Poems

The poems cover multiple topics of a confessional nature. They aren't titled, lack much restraint in positioning and stanza support, but nonetheless each tells a different story.

• "sapling" - The first poem that appears, talks about Little's mother being an alcoholic. The poem contains the line from which the collection gives its name.
• "I would like to think the sex in the other room" - It discussed Little being by two other people having sex and he writes about how he feels jealous.
• "straight wood" - In a disclaimer he posted on Tumblr, Little says that its subject, him having sex "with a 45 yr old dunkin donuts manager" is based on something similar that he had experienced a few years before, and is more about the guy rather than himself.
• "stay away from balconies" - A warning about getting too close to people, as they'll just end up using you and then using someone else after.
• "seldomly do i ever get to sleep" - It deals with welfare and the use of food stamps and how it barely "feeds the fridge".
• "when the lake in the movie" - An account of an adolescent discovering their orientation from a movie scene by a lake. The lake itself has no mean, and is just an object associated with the feeling.
• "if it was said then when" - Little writes about being born "yellow", meaning jaundice, and how his mother and he should have stayed at the hospital longer, as he feels they released them too soon and because of that he turned out gay.

Cover photo and release

The cover for At The Table With Your Mother was designed by Little the same night he had finished writing its final poem. The cover contains four different selfies of Little all taken in 2016 superimposed over one another; his eyes travel from the top left corner of the picture toward the middle. The title and his name appears on the right-hand side.

The book was then uploaded to Tumblr on July 20, 2016, just a few days before Little's 25th birthday. Little had originally planned on writing a few more to make it the appropriate length of a chapbook with hope it could be included in a poetry contest, but decided instead to mark it as an independent release for his Tumblr followers.