Reviewed by Charles Rammelkamp
But There’s So Much DIY in IVF That We Can’t Be Sure
by Toby Goostree
Fernwood Press
May 2024, $16.30, 70 pages, ISBN: 978-1594981296
With epigraphs from Genesis throughout the collection, Toby Goostree’s poems concerning a couple’s agonizing drama with in vitro fertilization as they try to have a child, mixes religious faith with medical science in startlingly lyrical meditations. This has nothing to do with the legislative implications of the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, but it has everything to do with hope and determination. The sonnet “Moses,” which takes as its starting point the biblical story of the Hebrew child being pushed into the Nile by its parents because Pharaoh has decreed that every Jewish male baby be killed, channels the anguish the baby’s parents felt taking that desperate step.
I’ve been waiting in the bushes, too
watching my wife down the river.
She’s crying. Her shoulders rise as she catches her
breath, carelessly running her hands through
the reeds like a child’s hair, son or daughter,
at her post, an empty basket beside her.
In poems like “Anovulation,” “The Kit Arrives,” “Follistim Pen,” and “Femara,” Goostree takes us through the nitty gritty of the process, all of the confusing terminology, the intricate equipment. The kit, which arrives in a styrofoam chest “like something / expensive from Legal Sea Foods,” includes syringes, needles, alcohol swabs, “something called Follistim Pen,” Ganirelex, Novarel, Follistim and Menopur, all mysterious, as outlined in “The Kit Arrives.” In the poem “Follistim Pen,” he sketches the procedure, from “I unscrew the cartridge holder” through
–I tap the cartridge and a tear swells
at the tip of the needle, ready to burst.
This releases air, ensuring
the right amount of dosage,
though there’s so much DIY in IVF
that we can’t be sure.
Beside herself, Amy watches.
If all of the medical detail is daunting and harrowing for the husband and wife, the reliance on faith is ineffectual. Comparing faith to a GPS device, in the poem “Faith,” Goostree laments that “you send me down a road / without service / or with only two bars.” The poet drives the point home, this tension between science and religious faith, in the poem “Femara,” a drug that stimulates ovulation, which:
essentially inhibits the enzyme
aromatase, which suppresses estrogen,
prompting the brain and pituitary gland
to increase the output of FSH,
follicle stimulating hormone. This
can result in the development of
a mature follicle in the ovary
and ovulation of an egg,
whereas prayer
In “Uniform,” “Ultrasound” and “Sperm Sample” the scene changes to the hospital, the almost Kafkaesque institutional setting, with powder blue gowns tied at the back, where his wife, Amy, is administered IVs, “her body is just a body, off the rack, anyone’s.” In another room, to supply the sperm sample, he is given “the cup, plastic-wrapped, / plucked from a bin in the supply room,” and to stimulate himself, watches NSFW (Not Safe For Work) porn DVDs. “NSFW? But it is work. / Just ask the actors…”
The allusions to the biblical characters, Abraham and Sarah and Isaac, Rachel and Noah and Moses, are illuminating. Sarah, after all, was barren into old age until God blessed her with Isaac. In a second poem titled “Faith,” with the epigraph from Genesis that reads, The Lord did for Sarah what he had promised, he writes:
But her breasts were empty,
and she felt envy
at the new mothers’ milk stains,
disabused of shame,
unaware of their good luck.
Who would have believed what they see now?
New wine in old wineskins, ready to burst.
One thinks of Keats’ line about “bursting joy’s grape against his palate fine” in “Ode on Melacholy,” when one reads this, the formerly sterile mother burdened with a melancholy so profound, only to experience its opposite. This is true of Sarah. It is unclear whether Amy was able to conceive, though there are hints in poems like “Back is Best,” about a baby in its crib and the dangers of SIDS, and “Only Child,” and in his Acknowledgments, Toby Goostree concludes with the sentence, “Amy, I was spoken for the moment you said my name. We gave everything we had and got more in return: Jack. Jack.” The very short poem, “Night Feeding” for mothers reads: “Sleep, sleep, colostrum of new mothers, / latched to the white noise of a baby monitor.” Colostrum, of course, is the first milk produced by the mammary glands after the delivery of a newborn. Perhaps there’s also a hint in the final poem, “January”:
When Noah cracked the hatch
in the ark’s roof,
he released a dove,
but she returned because
water still covered the earth.
He tried again
a week later, and she came back
with an olive branch
in her mouth.
The sonnet, “Theodicy,” which in the philosophy of religion is an argument that attempts to resolve the problem of evil when God is said to be both all-powerful and all-good, is a poem directed at God. It begins, “I am not asking for proof or an alibi,” but when it comes to these trials, the natural disasters as well as the personal disappointments, you have to ask the question. “Doubt could add risk. So could denial.” The poem ends on a somewhat humorous note:
Put your hand over the mic so the others
won’t hear, and you won’t have to whisper.
The lengthy penultimate poem, “Deus Ex Machina,” spoken in God’s voice, likewise seems to reveal the complicated mystery of promises. It takes the biblical story of the binding if Isaac, when God demands that Abraham sacrifice his son, to illustrate the complexities and mystery of faith. Of course, God spares Isaac at the last second, but the trial of faith is all Abraham’s.
Without being didactic, Toby Goostree presents all of the implications of the very real trials of hopeful parents trying to conceive a child, their attitudes, their hope and their despair, their grief (“Oh, foolish plans! / Oh, smug house in a good school district!” he writes in “The Scratch”). But There’s So Much DIY in IVF That We Can’t Be Sure underscores all of these very human responses.
About the reviewer: Charles Rammelkamp is Prose Editor for BrickHouse Books in Baltimore. His poetry collection, A Magician Among the Spirits, poems about Harry Houdini, is a 2022 Blue Light Press Poetry winner. A collection of poems and flash called See What I Mean? was recently published by Kelsay Books, and another collection of persona poems and dramatic monologues involving burlesque stars, The Trapeze of Your Flesh, was just published by BlazeVOX Books.