A Review of Stefanie Kirby’s 'Fruitful' (Driftwood Press, 2024) – By Vikki C.
To process and to write of pregnancy loss is no small undertaking for a mother. To then share and articulate that grief through a poetic voice that transcends the lives of those who may have experienced similar, is a remarkable accomplishment. Yet, Fruitful (Driftwood Press, 2024), the debut chapbook from Colorado-based author Stefanie Kirby, both honours and surpasses this complex proposition.
An intimate and powerful exploration into the grief-stricken spaces arising from the trauma of miscarriage and stillbirth, Fruitful pulls the audience into an arresting and surreal sequence. Lines rife with images that address a mother’s body in the context of fertility and the trials of pregnancy and associated loss whilst raising a family.
These poems also cast an essential light on the pivotal yet often undervalued role of motherhood and women’s bodies within the scope of modern society. From early in the collection, “The Uterus Belongs To The Family” speculates the womb’s capacity in what it can bear and is expected to bear:
In a uterus: a set of keys. Ask me what I’ve
got to unlock. Ask me what else is inside:
this spooling chain–link fence, a buried
spade. A knife for paring fruit or carving
anything hollow. A chest with enough
drawers to store winter layers. A tidal flood.
[3]
Images which allude to myriad roles from labour to nurturing, safeguarding and providing ample nourishment – even conferring a “miracle/Act of God” (tidal flood) upon her offspring. At the same time, this “tidal flood” perhaps harbours a potentially destructive force beyond her control, one which she must contend with in parallel to the challenges of motherhood. We are immediately confronted with a picture of the inherent risk women endure during pregnancy.
It is Kirby's innate ability to map the function of the womb to the larger maternal identity and purpose, that hones a sense of empathy with our own losses – furnishing the reader with immediate visions of everyday scenes that expand into the greater fabric of existence. Each line precisely taut in its construction, draws on a sort of metaphysical cinema where life and death play out in close proximity. Within these deft spiritual layers, Kirby projects the microcosm of a mother’s pain alongside acute images of broader ecological concerns.
The poem “Abruption” specifically considers the physical trauma of the speaker’s miscarriage within an extended metaphor on climate emergency:
Sometimes I want a clean break rather than
tearing membrane, webbed with vein
and vessel set to burst. Would rather
hemorrhage like ice into wave, no pushing
required. Except
icebergs detach like afterbirth, the glacier
a plate, the flat surface from which placenta
derives. Does similarity end there? I’d argue
melt mimics decay in gradual temperature
shifts that promote shapelessness. The slide
between legs or tides: a symptom of
destruction. [7]
As we read, the poems unravel a marked emptiness left behind by the event. A void which renders the womb a site of grief that consumes and disorientates, alternating between dreamlike prayer and lament and more disturbing visions of death. The poet however approaches this difficult subject with skill and beauty deploying intertextuality to portray the conflicting nature of grief:
In “This Womb, Hollow”, we gain a slow moving sense of what is removed, what decays and is taken almost organically by time:
like teeth birds line the bridge, divide
into wings to become hours falling in
on themselves grain by grain. A gradual
burial in time, where sand curves
into a belly. Into an abdomen of sky. [18]
These ethereal, almost heavenly allusions, are a stark contrast to the dislocating urgent images in the preceding poem “If My Womb Shot Bullets” where the speaker asserts: “ I know nothing about loading guns, but my womb/ seems comfortable chambering rounds.”
The symbolic image of birds in the previous poem now meets a more brutal fate: “Speckled in camouflage, she takes pot-shots at headstones. A few birds scatter, their descent almost wingless. She reloads, hoists the rifle to the crook of her neck, aims for sky. I wonder what she’ll shatter, which bodies will fall.”
There’s a keen sense of loss of control and anger where the womb is in a sort of retaliation and later, detachment from the body and persona. Something which manifests as a “womb in ebb: no longer residential, a windowless/shell. The best ruins remain/unforgiving, their brick carved/ into a lidless eye.” (“Study With Mouth & Walls”)
The chapbook’s titular poem “Fruitful” further extends the metaphorical radius of loss by considering the “faltering” body as a polluted city in which the womb is the centre of production:
The body at the center of the city, red lights
ripe as seeds after the flesh falls away. At
the center of the city: the womb, a factory in
this city of smoke.
[...]
The lake is oil loosed by this body, the waste
of production like ash or light or profit or
rind. At the center of the city: all this fruit
that pollutes.
These poems awaken the reader to a collective responsibility, to acknowledge personal wounds but also the impact of our lives on the milieu of the wider social landscape, namely how we protect and conserve it as if an extension of our bodies. A motif which emerges in the closing sequence where the speaker slowly brings her daughters into the picture: “To explain fruitfulness to my daughter/ I take out/my womb, set it between us like an apple or rock” (“Illumination”). “All of the daughters I didn’t have/ join you, the daughters I did” (“Ants”).
Lastly, the handing down of this legacy of awareness to the next generation in “I Ask My Daughter To Consider Her Body” where “the belief that to fill is better/ than to concede emptiness. To pack insides with glass and filament, shells and bones: what you should break to yield another body.”
We however take home more than a mere aphorism. We cradle with collective consciousness the vision the poet has set out to pave — to carry loss and build a fortress to protect ourselves from further rupture. To reconcile historical wounds with healing and a certain call to action. One that preserves and cherishes the precious gifts bestowed on our bodies and the earth. Ultimately, how to hold the shape of gifts eroded too soon.
Reconceptualizing the landscape of rupture and grief, Fruitful leads us to the wellspring of pain with boldness, care, affirmation and seeds of startling beauty to plant anew.
~
Stefanie Kirby's Fruitful was selected as the winning chapbook in the 2023 Adrift Chapbook Contest held by Driftwood Press and was later published in June 2024. For more details on the book, click here.