By Naomi Thiers
Chloe Yelena Miller’s book Viable (you can find it at www.chloeyelenamiller.com) is that semi-unusual thing, a collection of poems we need right now—because it touches on a human experience that cuts to the bone but isn’t often spoken directly about. I don’t think there is enough non-gauzy poetry published about childbirth itself and about caring for a very young infant—the true complexity and marvel of it. And there’s definitely not much poetry about losing a child through a miscarriage. I can hardly think of any collections of poetry centered on that kind of loss, only a few individual poems, such as “The Premonition” by Sharon Olds from The Gold Cell.
So, I’m truly glad to read Miller’s strong book Viable with its first section—“Carried”—entirely about the ache of losing a child two months into a pregnancy. The remaining two sections of the book express moving through a second pregnancy that does go full term, and the longest section, “Carry,” describes the birth of this son and the first years of life with him (though even this successful pregnancy carries a shadow of fear because of the recent miscarriage). These are situations, emotion-tangles, our culture has no rituals or pat phrases for, but that need to be talked about. Miller’s honest poetry invites us in.
Exploring aspects of language itself, including Italian grammar, helps Miller express the confused feelings and questions around losing a child you’ve never truly known, as in these stanzas from “Short Duet/Dualities”:
Words rhythm originates in blood flow, the opening and closing of chambers. Internal iambic pentameter. Here I am, left with one song. The doctor probes, searches for where you were.
The noun miscarriage conducts images like electricity. My mother pushed her baby in a tall-red carriage. Here sunshine, there are a new bonnet.
Shocks, seen and unseen, beneath the tires.
More often, Miller’s style is minimalistic with often one vivid image from nature flaring out. This works well for writing about shadowy grief our culture doesn’t have a label for. Here’s “Wasn’t”:
Before anyone else knew
I was pregnant,
I wasn’t.
I think of her as female
(to keep the narrative clear.)
Stemless cherry blossoms landed whole
on the sidewalk,
bright sun flattened the landscape
Cherry blossoms—hinting at the contrast between the bright, hot loveliness of spring in the Washington D.C. area (where Miller and I both live) and the bleakness of loss—return in my favorite poem in this section:
Objects
To mourn a woman,
carry her picture, wear her lapel pin.
There is nothing to wear
or carry after a miscarriage.
In Japan, mothers mourn
lost water children.
Gardens of small statues
in red knitted hats, bibs.
Hands in my pockets,
I stand at the edge of the Tidal Basin,
wilted cherry blossoms above and below.
Some of the subtlest, most crafted poems in terms of sound are those few which paint the speaker’s second pregnancy when awe mixes with some fear: “An infinity/ in your smallness, rapid growth./ So many parts we need to craft/for you to walk, eat or dance on a stage.”
Though it was years ago, I can remember pregnancy. The feeling of the baby alive and shifting inside during those months is an exceptionally hard sensation to funnel into words. Miller gets at it, as well as this time’s fizzy hope, in this poem which draws on the Italian concept of Iniziare (meaning to initiate or begin):
Italian vocabulary: Iniziare
A small liquid universe shifts
as I walk outdoors;
baby carried below my heart’s
iambic pentameter.
Fluids and doors opening.
You hear voices of to-be-loved parents.
So much yet-to-be
outside this expanding world.
Things really take off in the book’s final and often joyful section, which starts with a poem describing the physical sensations accompanying a Cesarean section—something I never thought to read in a poem. But why shouldn’t this way of giving birth, with its own odd feelings and atypical way of greeting the newborn, be brought alive through poetry? Many women experience a Cesarean—why shouldn’t we get this kind of news from poetry? Here’s most of “Three Weeks Early”:
Most of me, all of you, hidden:
blue curtain along my bare clavicle.
My head turns to one side to vomit,
jaw rattled with cold, I gasp.
Your father holds my hand, my face.
I think of my mother,
cold enough to ask for socks in labor.
I can’t feel my feet to know if they are cold.
You hear my cries before I hear yours.
You first see my wet face
from the distance of your father’s arms.
The sense of touch, more than any other, suffuses these poems about caring for an infant. Without being too graphic, they tell it like it is: the highs and the exhaustions, the non-gauzy reality of breastfeeding (“there’s a bruise on my breast/from your knocking for milk”), the rabbit hole of fascination with the baby you fall down. Many of the poems have short stanzas and short enjambed lines; they are full of repeating physical images (the baby’s mouth, fingers, skin pressing skin, sleep in all its stages, or lack of) and sometimes shift quickly from one odd image to an entirely new one. This mirrors the intense, enclosed, fuzzy quality of the first months with a new baby, that strangeness of suddenly being with a minuscule person you barely know and trying to fathom its habits. I’ll quote from two poems, first one that straps you into the intensity of a howling baby:
Empty, I’m a renamed woman – Mom –
holding a baby. He screams;
tonsils red, tongue vibrates,
like a revving engine.
He screams and screams and screams.
Oh, the screams!
(From “Birth Announcement”)
and one that taps into the intimacy of nursing:
My fingers support your infant skull,
above and below your ears.
Such fierce hunger at my breast:
your jaw shakes side to side,
toe-starting shiver to wail.
Finally, you settle,
and I understand hunger,
the loneliness of it all.
(From “Fierce Hunger”)
There’s one last section of five poems, each an apology, including an apology to the baby lost through miscarriage. These poems are short, cryptic, and express a gentle ache that lingers even as the speaker is, by the end, centered in a happy family (as depicted in the book’s lovely final poem, “Your Creation Story,” addressed to her son at age 6).
Miller’s book itself may get some people talking about miscarriage, but in addition, the book offers three pages of resources, poetry collections and memoirs that touch on pregnancy, miscarriage, and motherhood, and books dealing with grief. It’s quite a lot packed into one book. As one of Viable’s blurbs reads “it’s all there: the hope, the loneliness, the wreckage and the love.”
Miller, Chloe Yelena. Viable. Lily Poetry Review Books, 2021. Available at https://lilypoetryreview.blog/lily-poetry-review-press.
Naomi Thiers (naomihope@comcast.net) grew up in California and Pittsburgh, but her chosen home is Washington D.C./northern Virginia. She is the author of four poetry collections: Only the Raw Hands Are Heaven, In Yolo County, She Was a Cathedral, and Made of Air. Her poems, book reviews, and essays have been published in Virginia Quarterly Review, Poet Lore, Colorado Review, Grist, Sojourners, and other magazines. Former editor of the journal Phoebe, she works as an editor for Educational Leadership magazine and lives on the banks of Four Mile Run in Arlington, Virginia.
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