Thanks to the Publisher's Weekly 2009 list I discovered Rachel Zucker today. I wrote a little about her under that heading, but with further research I found "Welcome to the Blighted Ovum Support Group" http://42opus.com/v8n3/welcome-to
which explains men are too weak to have children and definitely fits into the TMI category, although it is impossible to look away.

I haven't read through all of poems at http://www.rachelzucker.net/poemsonline/... but I suspect they are all worthwhile.

Hmmm.

Further reading shows that Ms. Zucker has quite a fascination with birth and is a "certified labor doula" which wikipedia tells me is "an assistant who provides various forms of non-medical and non-midwifery support (physical and emotional) in the childbirth process." As near as I can tell this is something similar to the Lamaze thing we good fathers were supposed to be doing 37 years ago.

She also has a series of poems related to 9/11 and she created the the 100 Poems blog in which a number of younger poets wrote a poem a day to help Obama through his first 100 days. See http://100dayspoems.blogspot.com

I am overwhelmed by how she manages to mix such responsible parenting and civic mindedness with her obvious pleasure in apocalyptic events in the manner of Allen Ginsburg.

Here is one of her less gynecological poems.

The Dread of the Power of the Instincts


The good enough mother dreams of arson
and writes: "noodles: please warm."

The listening device insists but the child, coughing,
doesn't cry—shifts, shifts, turns over.

On the ultrasound-scan I looked porous: sponge
around the blinking fact of fetus and am still unfinished.

To say the form is organic is to say nothing.
This suffering, boredom.

A flawless beauty this nurture cuts and how the good enough
mother smoothes and files her patience.

How perfect, look, long suffering they say, and know nothing.

Kindle, smolder, flame, consume. Kindle, smolder, use.
I put out hors d'oeuvres, some of them half-frozen.

*****************************

Getting back to her parents, I discovered that her father, Benjamin Zucker, is not only an experimental novelist but also a dealer in gems. Her mother, Diane Wolkstein, is a professional storyteller of such renown the Mayor Bloomberg declared June 22, 2007 to be Diane Wolkstein Day.

When do any of them get time to watch The Simpsons?