Fecund by Katie Ebbitt

Fecund is composed of two sections/long poems: “Hysterical Pregnancy,” which originally appeared in chapbook form, and “Fecund,” a long poem with forty sections set off by bold faced, upper case Roman numerals. There’s one line in the book with 8 words, but otherwise the lines are exceedingly spare (1-5 words), leaving a sea of breathing white space on each page.

 

These short lines and spacious pages bespeak a tendency in current left margin-justified, broken line poetry of reformulating the line as a stanza made of several short lines:

 

to walk

public

ground

 

see

a middle

name

 

cut in stone

mothering

cementation

 

Ebbitt’s lines are cosmetically minimal, as though “cut in stone,” cemented. In actuality, though, the lines have a roving quality that, in my reading, ushers you on to the next piece quickly. Rather than feeling overly-crafted and tight, these short lines instead feel unfinished (uncemented) and open, liable for movement and expansion.

 

Because of that roving speed, Ebbitt’s poetry has “page” (as opposed, or in addition, to line) breaks. This is the case most obviously in “Hysterical Pregnancy,” in which one page of writing follows the other with no indication of a break between sections other than the start of a new page. The uncemented stanza-line and the page break is a kind of fecundity, in that the poem continues to be ripe, if in the way that decomposing things in the earth are ripe, for another growth:

 

Make an artifact

from an already

rendered artifact

 

keep going

until there

is nothing

left

 

It’s fitting that Ebbitt writes phrases like the “ecstatic / plural” and describes reality as “an unlegislable enormity.” These two phrases are also ways of defining fecundity, both the concept advanced by this book as well as the way its lines operate. “Hysterical Pregnancy” has the ecstatic plural vision, at one point identifying with fetuses in a situation of violence (“perfectly round / with your knees / against your teeth”), while “Fecund” has a more reflective and talkative air to it, attempting to process an enormity that is felt but not fully seen (“our / circumstances / hold us / as far as / the eye / can see”) and therefore difficult to capture in words.

 

Both works are cut with a heavy overtone of violence, physical and political, with Ebbitt revealing fecundity, ecstatic openness and liability towards overflow and expansion, to be a kind of abjection as well:

 

God

 

entering this world

I knew

I was

surplus

and open

for punishment

 

glean book

passages

to share

to convey

beyond

my ability

to articulate

 

I am finding

nothing

quite satiates

into quelling sensation

 

my sentences

keep slipping

 

and when

I look

at the bright sky

it’s too blue to feel

I am not unwell

 

I noticed that Ebbitt consistently uses the word “to” and the feature of anaphora, the infinitive working in tandem with the echoing repetition to give the poems their energy and speed, as well as a means of addressing and identifying with the thematic core of the work: that of abortion, and how the lived experience implicates philosophical questions about time, negation, and possibility:

 

to watch

as the crow

picks up

her stick

 

to puncture

a colony

of ants

 

to be

within

fragile

tininess

 

to reach

the moment

of opening to

the other

 

to reach

potential

 

Thinking back to the “ecstatic / plural” nature of the work, the use of the infinitive invites others who have undergone the experience to harness the labor done by the work to process, to collectively abreact.

 

In a later section of “Fecund,” Ebbitt writes:

 

To release

life into

the same

realm as

decision

 

to be a real

person

 

Ebbitt’s stanza-lines catapult forward and invite revisitation, create a space where the limits between presence and absence imposed by the “realm [of] decision” are called into question.

 

Buy it here.