Paris, 1580
In the salle sauvage, in the animal body of labor, women labored,
slept, recovered, up to five in a bed. Book-trained doctors

delivered women of their babies with hands still slick and stained
from the autopsied bodies of mothers who'd died

hours earlier of childbed fever inside the same hot rooms. The doctors
blamed the mothers for their fevers: their split-open bodies

were filled with pus, and the men saw milk gone wandering,
rotten, clotted in the abdomen and intestines.

The doctors blamed the women's shame and worry, the lack of fresh air,
the sewer gas. They filled the wards with smoke

to purify the air and walked unwashed between delivery room and morgue.
There are rooms where a woman's rickets-narrowed pelvis

is displayed in brine, where baby girls joined at the hip swim in a jar,
where a fetal skeleton is passed through a pelvic basin

to show how birth is meant to work. The doctors were taught to deliver
without looking, to work in the dark, shielded

by huge sheets draped over mother and physician.
The women labor flat-backed in the stirrupped position

named for stones. The doctors wield forceps, from the Latin for
hot and seize, the paired spoons that scoop the baby

from the birth canal, the way a line cook grabs a burger from the grill
with tongs. Yanked from where I'd lodged

inside my mother's narrow hips, collarbone broken,
but alive, redheaded, howling,

I was born like that.
from the journal CHERRY TREE
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"Two summers ago, while my best friend and my sister were both pregnant and due within days of each other, and once my own kids were just old enough that I could think a little more clearly about birth and early motherhood, I spent a lot of time reading about the history of birth to try to understand this common but mysterious and often life-threatening passage. This poem is one result of that reading."

Nancy Reddy on "In the Hôtel-Dieu"
Four Way Books Announcement of June Open Reading period
 
 
Bhanu Kapil performs How to Wash a Heart, at the ICA, London, 19 June 2019
"Every Country is Imaginary"

Joanna Lee reviews the best recent poetry collections, including How to Wash a Heart by Bhanu Kapil, Saffron Jack by Rishi Dastidar, The Atlas of Lost Beliefs by Ranjit Hoskote and Shine, Darling by Ella Frears.

via THE GUARDIAN
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Cover of Theodore Roethke's Collected Poems
What Sparks Poetry:
Allison Cobb on Theodore Roethke's "I Knew a Woman"

"I encountered Theodore Roethke’s 'I Knew a Woman' in my teacher Rebecca Shankland’s high school English class. We read it alongside Wallace Stevens’ 'Emperor of Ice Cream.' These were probably the first two poems I had read from the twentieth century. They made poetry seem a living possibility to me, not something entombed in the past."
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