Reviewed by Charles Rammelkamp
Twelve Days from Transfer
by Eleanor Kedney
Three: A Taos Press
Jan 2024, $26.00, 103 pages, ISBN: 978-1737056089
The title of Eleanor Kedney’s searing new collection of poetry refers to the process of in vitro fertilization. An embryo transfer is the final stage in the process, where the fertilized egg is placed in the uterus. The title also suggests the agony and uncertainty of waiting,
the complicated, invasive procedure, from stimulating the ovaries to produce healthy eggs, to their retrieval, to their fertilization with the sperm, before the transfer to the uterus. Twelve Days to Transfer is also, therefore, necessarily a meditation on womanhood and motherhood. Indeed, the very first poem, “Infertility Compendium,” sets the terms, the stigma Kedney and other women with fertility issues must face:
We were named witches,
the talked about, the barren,
wombs twisted, possessed
by Nirrti, Goddess of Destruction.
Later in the poem she details the consequences of the condition, during the Middle Ages, and if the punishments are not so extreme now, the aura of being “less than” still exists:
Devil-poisoned seed.
Wandering metra.
We drank the cures: urine,
the blood of pregnant animals,
ate powdered boar penis,
the hind paws of weasels.
Twelve Days of Transfer tells the story of Kedney’s own unsuccessful attempts at carrying a child, the complex emotional responses to the inability to conceive, the guilt, the grief, but also the relief. She writes about her experiences in grief support groups and with friends, as well as her own complex IVF experience.
Twelve Days to Transfer is reminiscent of another recent collection on the subject, Toby Goostree’s But There’s So Much DIY in IVF That We Can’t Be Sure. Goostree’s poems are from a male perspective, and eventually the IVF is successful, the parents over the moon. By contrast, Kedney’s was not successful. She describes the pressures women face, the inevitable emotional blowback. As she writes in the poem “Quickening”:
After I stopped trying to get pregnant—
three failed inseminations,
hope bagged, tied shut—
a friend told me of a vacuum aspiration,
she hadn’t yet felt the fetus stir,
the procedure brief. She asked,
Are you angry?
She had been angry, she confesses, at her body, at her husband, at God, at pregnant strangers and at the friends who’d stopped inviting her to their children’s birthday parties, but “No, I answered, lit a candle, match spark / like the flash of light when a sperm / makes contact with an egg.”
With each failed pregnancy, the poet is assaulted by well-meaning friends and strangers. As she writes in “Six Gray Moons on a Screen,” a metaphor that refers to embryos lost in the menstrual flow:
They said, There’s always adoption.
They said, God has a plan.
They said, It’ll happen.
Trust me, you’re lucky you don’t have kids.
They said, Hang in there.
They said, Focus on your career.
My husband just looks at me, and I get pregnant.
Friends in grief groups commiserate, as Kedney writes in “Imagine,” and in “Daybreak,” her friend Donna reasons, “At least you’ll never feel the pain of losing a child.” The poem “No Reply” starts:
Women who didn’t know we were trying
told me my clock was ticking,
I was selfish, I’d be sorry,
you’ll want them later,
motherhood is the best joy of life.
Later in the poem, “Think about
the positives of not being pregnant
more restful sleep, av
oiding weight gain,
no morning sickness.
And finally, at a Fourth of July party, when a woman asks her if she has any children, and she answers that she is unable to have them,
Her face widened, and she leaned back
on the porch step, not knowing
what to say.
In “A Different Woman,” Kedney tries on another version of the situation.
My husband is my family.
Kids are too much of a struggle.
Kids cost too much.
We don’t feel anything is missing from our lives.
I don’t want my body to change.
I prefer child-free to childless,
have it printed on my coffee mug.
There’s no closure, just this constant whiplash, fending off the well-intentioned comments, second-guessing herself.
Still, a “subplot” in Twelve Days from Transfer is the ten poems sprinkled throughout the book that focus on the poet’s relationship with an Indian family, Saritha (“I knew I wanted to help her, but would I love her like a daughter I had birthed?” Kedney asks in “A Row of Threaded Bangles on her Wrist.”) and Sri Ram (“On my way back to the airport, over a roadside breakfast of dahl and rice, Sri Ram asked if he could call me mom. He added, You treat me like my mother,” she writes in “The Penny Jar.”).
“Origin” tells of Sri Ram’s position in the rigid Indian caste system, bullied by the Brahmins, his sympathy for the untouchables – the Dahlits. “When Birds Fall out of the Sky,” “A Pleasant Mind” and “First Smile,” when Sri Ram and his wife Madhavi have their first child, Aravind, deepen the connection.
“Random Field Stones…” (“When I speak of Sri Ram as my son, I offer you magic”), “…Washed in Turmeric” (“I would become his mother later in his life”) and “Women in Translation” (“Laxmi has learned I love you in English.”) complete the picture of the close bond.
Kedney’s relationship with her own mother was complicated, as she writes in “My Mother’s Hands” and “Rebirth” (“After my mother died—her loneliness steeped / in mine throughout the orbit of our lives— / I learned to uncork grief in high pitches”). In “Bubbles Blown Through a Wand” Kedney writes, “I was scared the pregnancy test would be positive. I’d already been a mother to my own mother, calling to her in the dark pool of an armchair to go to bed….”
Kedney also writes about the love of pets as a form of parenting in “Simple Math” and “The Pink Rose,” in which she tells us she bought herself a tea towel with Dog Mom printed on it. In “Simple Math” she writes:
The drywaller muds the cement board,
asks if I have kids. I have a dog
and a cat. My way of declaring
I’m not without nurturing instincts.
That’s not kids, he retorts.
(I know that.)
Twelve Days from Transfer is a brave, confessional collection of lyrical meditations on being a woman and a mother that spells out a complex, deeply emotional set of circumstances and 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.