Katie Ebbitt, Fecund

 

To start
here is
invisible

changeable
borders

a threshold

the vessel
the stomach

see what you
come out of
came out with

now bloodied
by consummation (“HYSTERICAL PREGNANCY”)

I’d been looking forward to Manhattan poet Katie Ebbitt’s full-length debut for some time, her Fecund (New York NY: Keith LLC, 2024), a collection made up of a pair of long poems—“HYSTERICAL PREGNANCY” (which previously appeared as a chapbook through above/ground press) and “FECUND”—two sequences that showcase her ability to stretch a long thought, a long line. The poem opens, begins and further opens, writing of birthing, absence, physiological change, birth’s paradoxes, female agency and reproductive choice. “I opened / a cabinet / to find / a rotting / bird,” she writes, early on in the opening sequence, “I lied / about / the sympathetic // I couldn’t / take back / time [.]” “Fecund’s thematic resonance grapples with autonomy and positioning itself in space and time,” Ebbitt offers, as part of an interview last fall at Hobart, conducted by Nadia Prupis, “and maybe the fascia of the book is trying to position oneself in time and feeling unable to do so, and how time relates to biology or how biology can steal time away, or gift time.” The two pieces side-by-side exist as a pairing, a duo, almost as counterpoint. “we want / the body / even / if it’s just / dead skin,” she writes, in the third numbered section of the title poem (a poem that works all the way up to forty), “we look at / all the little / fetuses // we say / that having / a child / is to take / your heart out // to put that / heart inside / someone / else’s body [.]” Her poem, her pairing, is set in the body, the heart. With remarkable pacing, steady, slow and unbroken, the poem is set in agency, a long, articulated lyric thread that sits at the heart of that very moment, that choice and that becoming, being. This is a remarkable, and remarkably complex, debut, one that needs to be read repeatedly, and in good time. In the same interview, as Ebbitt continues, further on:

This book began really in response to Brett Kavanaugh being placed onto the Supreme Court. I’ve always been really interested in reproductive rights and access to abortion, and I’m a healthcare worker myself. When this project started, I was in a school-based health center working in their mental health department, but it was predominantly focusing on teen sexual health and access to various resources, and one of those resources was abortion services. And I’ve been following the way in which abortion rights have been stripped away. And with Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment to the Supreme Court, it seemed like this concerted political campaign from the Right was taking hold in a way where there would be the potentiality of Roe V. Wade being reversed. The first poem written for this project, which actually isn’t even included in this book, was this prayer of fecundity I was writing as I was reading the news and feeling really disembodied and fearful.

It’s a strange thing when you are fearing for your body because of an external force. You’re contemplating the possibility of needing care that you will not have the potential to access and ways in which the state strips away such basic autonomy. So the book started thinking about that. At first, it was all kind of prayers directed at potentiality and fecundity and choice, and reflecting on what choice means and kind of the limitations of choice and the things we decide for ourselves versus the things that we don’t.