Kim Fahner : Q&A, by Adrienne Gruber

Q & A., Adrienne Gruber
Book*hug Press, 2019

 

 

 

Having never had a child, it is perhaps odd that I’m reviewing a book of poetry about pregnancy and birthing. I know absolutely nothing about it, except for what I’ve heard second hand from friends. Twenty years ago, I had one friend tell me that she had thought she was going to die during childbirth. It was such a traumatic experience for my friend that she only had one child. You so rarely hear about these stories of struggle. Adrienne Gruber’s Q & A is a book that documents her first pregnancy and the birth of her daughter. What comes after, too, is a reflection on postpartum life. Here, in poetic form, is a book that actually wants to tell the unpolished truth of what it is like to travel through pregnancy, birth, and beyond.

There are some brilliant poetic sequences in Q &A, one of which is Gruber’s “What to Expect When You’re Expecting (100 Years Ago),” wherein she speaks to some of the historical beliefs that once surrounded the mystery of pregnancy. One belief is “When long walks cannot be taken,/carriage riding may be substituted,” while another is that “A lazy woman bears a long,/painful childbirth.” Women should have “no fear that the bath will disturb/the contents of the womb,” and “A woman’s sexual nature should find expression in motherhood,/not the grosser forms of sexual activity.” Such outdated and archaic views of sex and birthing are, thankfully, now cast off with a derisive laugh and a shake of the head.

In “Gestational Fall,” Gruber writes of a hike taken along the West Coast Trail, a journey that is not for the faint of heart or body. She hiked it with her partner while she was pregnant with her first child. She writes: “We carried our bones for days. Each night I wiped between my/thighs and to my relief the paper came out clear.” Then, in “Ode to Lucy’s Pelvis,” Gruber speaks of the pain of a lengthy labour. The poet references “Lucy”—Australopithecus aferensis—our common female ancestor: “I curl fetal./Calves throb/tendons convulse./Pray for apoplexy.” Gruber’s is a poetry that tells the truth about the gruelling and graphic nature of childbirth.

This is not the airbrushed and photoshopped recollection of childbirth that we so often hear about after women have given birth. In my experience, the majority of my women friends seem to have had really wonderful birthing experiences. Have they told me the truth, or is there a secret society of women who promise they won’t tell other women the really honest stories of birthing? Do they just leave things out? Is there an erasure of what happened? I’m not sure. What Gruber does here, though, is peel back the superficial glow that is more traditionally presented and speaks instead—realistically—of how a woman’s body can be nearly broken by the birth experience, and how her mind and body will be changed forever afterwards.

After poems that speak to the ‘in between’ space of waiting for a baby to arrive, in pieces like “Time Is Still (Linear)” and “Last Straw,” Gruber shifts into poems like “Finale,” “Push,” and “The Cat Has the Stunned Look of a Murder Witness,” where the birth of the poet’s first daughter, Quintana, is documented. In “Haikus for Baby Blues,” Gruber gets at the crux of post-partum depression when she writes of how it has traditionally been written off as ‘just a passing thing,’ something to be lived through and managed: “Don’t worry, experts/coddle. You should be able/to just shake it off.” She writes of a placenta that “left a hole.” Hormonal surges are to be expected, but this doesn’t make them easy to fathom or navigate. “My therapist says/fear is a bird that searches/for a place to land.” Would that it would be so simple, to find a place for that bird to land, to calm the surging.

Gruber isn’t afraid to honestly document the stories that are not as frequently shared. In “Cephalopelvic,” the poet writes of how a rough birth process can “crush and kill/the soft tissues of pelvis.” There are those babies who don’t live through the journey, “a fetus asphyxiates,” or a woman is “left/with the decaying seraph/inside” until it is born afterwards, a child who still has a name that ought not to be forgotten.

Adrienne Gruber’s Q & A is a fascinating collection of poems because it pulls back the veil on things that haven’t often been spoken about when it comes to the bodily journeys that women undertake during their lifetimes. For those of us who haven’t carried a child, it’s a doorway into a world that seems almost secret and hidden. For those of us who have had children, well, I would imagine it would be a relief to read more of the reality of childbirth. These are poems that don’t shirk from the gruesome physicality of birthing, but there is beauty here, too, in the poet’s love for her daughter, and in the recognition that there are many sides to the prism of a woman’s life.

 

 

 

 

Kim Fahner lives and writes in Sudbury, Ontario. She was poet laureate in Sudbury from 2016-18, and was the first woman appointed to the role. Kim's latest book of poems is These Wings (Pedlar Press, 2019). She's a member of the League of Canadian Poets, the Ontario representative of The Writers' Union of Canada (2020-22), and a supporting member of the Playwrights Guild of Canada. Kim can be reached via her author website at www.kimfahner.com