The Decadent Movement : Poems (Pitt Poetry Series)

The Decadent Movement is a book-length suite of poems that spins backward in time through the early days of parenthood and the preceding nine months of pregnancy. Beginning a year after childbirth in the harried throes of marriage and parenting, the collection proceeds toward its finale “Minus Time,” which marvels at death’s near-identical twin – that infinite period of nonexistence that precedes each new life. From the opening poem “Afterword,” each dated poem slides backward in time, with the poem “Hinge” at the manuscript’s midpoint spoken from the moment of childbirth. This unraveling of a predicament by playing it in reverse – “Muybridged / out so anyone could see, framed, a woman / running for her life” – allows for rigorously honest accounting of mixed feelings about motherhood and its accompanying physical and psychic changes, detached from the readymade tropes of the “pregnancy plot.” The Decadent Movement is a book about the fear of loss (of sexual personhood, bodily self-determination, the ability to write, and the license to be headlong and volatile). Yet it is also about the need to insist on new terms of engagement with those we love, new languages of willfulness and desire.