A Swedish-American midwife is a Best of the Net poet and Pushcart Prize nominee, and has released her bold, life-affirming debut poetry collection.
"A midwife is in the thick of it, she sees it all," Jennifer Worth, author of Call the Midwife. It is midwifing in its broadest sense—from releasing a newborn’s stuck shoulders or catching a baby in the caul, to Socratic questioning around body autonomy, social justice and climate sustainability. The poems are layered and bi-cultural, rooted in contrasts between America and Sweden, as well as between colonial/industrial and ecological/relational ways of caring for each other and the earth. With a sense of humor, love, art and aging, Jordemoder is a collection of midwifed hope.
Maw
In the middle of the night, my mother
would bury her face
in her mute, farm-woman's hands
between the hinged high-fidelity
speakers of our Zenith
record player, the soaring trills
of Verdi's dying Violetta
vanquishing the dark.
At the end of the opera,
she’d raise her head, revived,
and I learned from the edge
of the living room: life
turns on passion, as much as breath.
In the middle of the afternoon, I learned
not to be afraid of Virginia Woolf
or Hedda Gabler. And now, when
my child goes looking for his mother,
I can explain: it's in the genes,
or a law of nature, or some
all-consuming love—disappearing
into the maw of entropy and art.
