Admittedly, I am the first to roll my eyes and scoff at literature of the ‘don’t worry, be happy’ genre. There is nothing more vexing than being told to calm down during moments of intense anxiety.

100 Happy Poems. Jane McMorland ... Her books include a travel narrative, A Rambling Fancy: in the F... MORE. Caroline Sanderson. MORE. You may also like (M)otherhood: On the choices of being a woman.

Thank god for literature complicating that narrative. In a new collection of poems about maternal mental health, All That We Ask of You Is to Always Be Happy , Durham poet Bridget Bell does just that.

I’m a fan of narrative poems, poems that tell a story. As I see it, that’s how poetry started, with epic poems that had to be memorized to be passed down, as people didn’t have printing ...