Jordemoder: Poems of a Midwife

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.