There is a place most women know but few books inhabit: the space between who you once were and who you are becoming. Between daughter and mother. Between hope and grief.

Jacqueline Kolosov has written her way through that place with honesty, intelligence, and prose of rare beauty. In essays ranging from the West Texas plains to the gardens of London to the cliffs of St. Ives, she traces the years in which she underwent fertility treatment, suffered a miscarriage, raised a young daughter, and sat at the bedside of a friend whose cancer would not relent. Braided throughout are the lives of the women artists she returns to — Mary Cassatt, Virginia Woolf, and Vanessa Bell — as well as an unexpected teacher: the horses through whom she finds her way back to the present.

Searching, tender, and deeply alive, Motherhood, and the Places Between is the book readers will press into the hands of the women they love most.

Jacqueline Kolosov's story collection, Exit, Pursued by a Bear, was published by Hollywood Books last fall (Winner of the Prize Americana). She has published 3 full-length collections of poetry; her 4th is talons, wings, forthcoming from Saint Julian Press. Among her publications are several novels for teens, including The Red Queen's Daughter (Hyperion/Disney). She has coedited three anthologies of contemporary writing, among them Family Resemblance: An Anthology and Exploration of 8 Hybrid Literary Genres, [Winner of Foreword's IndieFab Gold Medal in Nonfiction] (Rose Metal). Her work has appeared in numerous venues in the US and abroad including The Southern Review, The Sewanee Review, Prairie Schooner, Bellevue Literary Review, Poetry, & The Moth. Originally from Chicago, she now lives in West Texas and serves on the Creative Writing and Literature Faculty at Texas Tech University. Her awards include an NEA Literature Fellowship in Prose. An equestrian, animal lover, and former long distance runner turned swimmer and walker, much of her work is influenced by the visual arts, literature and philosophy, place, and art in community health.

"Motherhood, and the Places Between is a moving, thought-provoking and incisive collection of essays exploring the interlinking strands of motherhood, transformation and loss. Through a deeply-personal lens, the book asks vital questions about community and responsibility, most pertinently about the challenges of raising a child in a dangerous, hostile and rapidly-changing world. Intimate, compassionate and lyrical, these essays invite us into the inner life of a fiercely curious mind grappling with the struggles of what it means to live and love and nurture and care in these volatile times. A profound and transformative book." — Sam Meekings, author of Wonder and Loss: A Practical Memoir for Writing about Grief

"Such a gorgeous book of essays! Jacqueline Kolosov lays herself bare in these finely-tuned, supremely lyrical pieces - her deep yearning for a second child, the rollercoasters of hope and heartbreak as she navigates fertility treatments, the refuge she finds in her young daughter, Virginia Woolf, and, ultimately, horses. Kolosov is a writer who pours all her love into the world, and in return discovers beauty lurking in the unlikeliest of places." — David McGlynn, A Door in the Ocean & Everything We Could Do

"The linked lyric essays in Motherhood, and the Places Between chronicle Jacqueline Kolosov's journey through multiple rounds of donor-egg in-vitro fertilization in pursuit of a second child. Meditations on motherhood in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, in the paintings of Mary Cassatt, and in the lives of others provide a poignant counterpoint to Kolosov's experiences of hope and loss. In poetic yet unflinching prose, these essays lay bare the fierce will to live alongside the ever-present reality of death. This deeply-moving collection will resonate long after you've finished reading." — Margo Singer, Secret Agent Man & coeditor Bending Genre: Essays on Creative Nonfiction

"Motherhood, and the Places Between is an exquisite, meditative reflection on the IVF experience, family and the myriad moments that make up a life. With interlaced stories, Jacqueline Kolosov explores the delicate balance between yearning and acceptance, presence and possibility, grief and abundance. She threads Virginia Woolf's dreamlike awarenesses of time, memory and perception through the collection, weaving them into the physicality of clinical procedures, interactions with her young daughter and the solidity of horses and nature. Living in the liminal spaces, Kolosov boldly and gently shares what it's like on the precipice of potential new life, while teaching us how to navigate and embrace the unknowable." — Ann Campanella, Motherhood: Lost and Found

"Jacqueline Kolosov, following in the path of great thinker and lyric prose writer, Virginia Woolf, has given us an astonishing 'Sketch of the Past,' for our tumultuous times. The beating heart of these linked essays is a gripping, heart-wrenching IVF journey but its reach expands deep into an exploration of both her ancestral and literary past, familial wounds, the sustaining nature of some friendships—even after death, Mary Cassatt's passion for 'freedom to work,' the nuanced and complex relationships with medical professionals, and the way caring for a beloved daughter, dogs, and horses can give us the communion that provides life with profound meaning. Weaving Woolf's luminous prose with her own, Kolosov reminds us, in case we have forgotten that 'the great revelation perhaps never did come' and that we only get moments of happiness or 'moments of being' as Woolf called them. And how, as humans, that is what abides and sustains us through our lives. This triumphant book exemplifies 'the value of story' as Kolosov writes in the final essay,with its variegated points of light." — Jennifer Franklin, A Fire In Her Brain