Mammal: Sacrifice Is Not a Virtue

MAMMAL probes how the inescapable rhythms of our physicality govern our emotional hungers. We like to view ourselves as in control, but the reality is that desires we don’t quite understand determine how we relate to ourselves, our partners, our children, our parents. Even metaphysical, spiritual quests are launched from the plane of the sensorial, which hinges on our animalistic need for survival. Intimate relationships, too, are at the mercy of our inborn-and often opposing-longings for both emotional stability and adventure, generating subtle layers of conflict with others that we have difficulty comprehending. Mammal sings from deep within these layers.

The book is organized into three sections, each prefaced with a quote by authors whose voices are crucial to the text-Sharon Olds, Anne Carson and Elena Ferrante. Within each section, poems, lineated and prose poems are used to explore different facets of motherhood, pregnancy, and the body, without prescribing to obvious reproductive patterns. Rather, the book exists in a state of atemporality. Several of the poems are titled Week XX and feature a different number from one to forty, suggesting the gestational process, but these poems are dispersed through the manuscript outside of the established numerical order. They appear to signal our disordered, disheveled selves.

The tension between physicality and selfhood, between biological processes and their cultural implications, and between ecology and the storylines we construct to explain (and thus attempt to contain) it are plumbed in MAMMAL’s pages. No entity can claim credit for the way our bodies work, and as such any attempt to brandish the body as a weapon is baseless. Embodied experience is murky ground, at once the root and lofty branch of consciousness, but if we are to disassemble the narratives that are used against us, we must first dare to name them-without romanticism or preciousness.

MAMMAL lifts the veil off romanticized motherhood to challenge the notion that sacrifice is a virtue. Its lush, multivalent verse gives voice to what is left unsaid in that all important space of the home.