In this chapter, I argue that Bernadette Mayer’s body of work functions as a feminist critique of theeveryday-life tradition, exposing some of these important blindspots and gaps at its heart. To do so, Mayerdevelops a groundbreaking mode that I call “the poetics of the maternal everyday.” I use this phrase to referto a feminist aesthetic that explores how daily experience is inescapably shaped by gender, that strives torepresent the lived realities of being a woman and a mother, and insists on the fact that motherhood isalways, at some level, political. In short, the poetics of the maternal everyday oers a sti challenge to thesupposed universality that has long cloaked the implicit male-ness at the heart of many models of dailiness.4

our sense of what constitutes the everyday is radically dependentupon perspective and subject position