ISBN: 9781945680359
Editorial: White Pine Press
Autor: Greenfield, Sonia
Año de edición: 2020
N° Paginas: 102
Tipo de pasta: Pasta blanda
Descripción: A hybrid memoir and valentine to her firstborn, Letdown encompasses the story of a woman when fertility issues arise at the same time the diagnosis of her son’s autism, complicating motherhood in unexpected ways. Portrays the transcendence found amidst difficulty. Review “With Letdown, Sonia Greenfield proves herself a master of the prose poem, finding just the right metaphor, just the right syntax. This book-length sequence reads like a love story between a mother and her son, and like all love stories―all the true ones, anyway―there is pain alongside the joy. Greenfield takes us down into the dark, confronting what it is to feel helpless against your child’s suffering, to mother a child with special needs, to recalibrate one’s life after loss. But she also leads us back into bright California sunlight, where we find the boy―and this messy life―rising from the depths, ‘buoyant, better than expected.’ ” ―Maggie Smith, author of Good Bones “Beautifully constructed in sixty stand-alone parts, this book-length poem presents―artfully, honestly―a woman’s difficult parsing of motherhood. We first meet her in the hospital suite, the careful birth-plan abandoned, as it was as effective as ‘closing a sliding door on a tsunami.’ Later, we follow her confusion and terror through her son’s autism diagnosis; during the EEG test, she distracts him as wires are gelled to his head, saying, ‘Look, now you get to become a robot.’ Her son’s traumatic medical journey is detailed alongside her hidden trauma, fertility loss. Sonia Greenfield has used her excellent ear and metaphorical power to create a moving and necessary book.” ―Beth Ann Fennelly, author of Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs About the Author Sonia Greenfield lives with her husband, son, and two rescue dogs in Minneapolis, where she edits the Rise Up Review and teaches at Normandale College. Her work has appeared twice in Best American Poetry, among other places. Letdown is her second book. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. They used to believe the mis of carriage was payment for a mis-deed. But there are two shadow halves here. One half, failure. The other half―though which sits on top and which is below is hard to say―is diagnosis. I ask another member of my default sisterhood if she questions whether some mis- of the body set her son askew on earth, because we always find ourselves blaming our eggs, our age, our appetites. We wonder whether it was something in our milk. From Connecticut to Washington to California, every place I fled to, all the mothers I meet assume responsibility. We read the latest studies. We try all the cures. We wear a scarlet A. I remember I didn’t drink then I edit memory and imagine I did. Otherwise, why? All my life I never knew what to say or how to be, and I wonder whether disorder was born in me. …….. At fifteen and a half weeks I experienced a quickening like popcorn popping or a faint finger-drumming on a small table. Somewhere around eighteen weeks, a plucked nylon guitar string, the feeling acoustic, the music wasn’t electric: fingers rolling off strings like lazy strumming. The inside of my belly the body of a guitar. In the early twenties you kicked your father in the ear, and he was endeared. At twenty-eight, a dryer drum tumbled balled-up socks. At thirty weeks, an earthquake. Hard spots and soft spots, a whole, small body moving in there. All the way around, from below my breasts to just above my pubic bone. You slept when I slept and stayed with me through winter. …… I want to describe it, to tell the whole story. That the birthing suite and its muted walls were details lost in rage. That the Joni Mitchell I played―the candy of her voice―could not be heard over my retching. That all the ways I thought I had prepared were like closing a slider on a tsunami. That I couldn’t listen to myself whimper anymore, the anesthesiologist floating to me like a goddess in in
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