The Decadent Movement, by Laura Kolbe (Pittsburgh). This “diary in poems” documents, in reverse chronological order, the nine months of the speaker’s pregnancy and her first year of motherhood—what the book’s opening entry describes as “a span of life ranged with newish / mountains,” and pledges “not to smooth or numb.” Kolbe’s distinctive use of language brings to life this period’s wonders and difficulties, and her maximalist approach to metaphor creates many energetic images. Though visceral, musical, and tender, the collection takes a cerebral, almost scientific attitude toward maternity (the author is also a physician)—not by drawing a clinical distance but by treating it as something to be observed from every possible angle.
(Starred review) The powerful sophomore collection from Kolbe (Little Pharma) documents pregnancy and the postpartum period through the twin lenses of her experiences as a mother and a doctor. These poems describe a child’s early years with unforgettable poignancy: “I cut his hair today like/ slicing/ an orange or netting/ a Christmas tree.” The collection is at its strongest when Kolbe’s singular imagistic music (recalling, in its density, the work of poet Lucie Brock-Broido) dovetails with her keen sense of anatomical precision: “at bathtime I admire on S./ The dollops of deltoids and biceps, sleepy// Ladyfingers, soaked and lolling like hatched turtles/ Stunned by the sea.” The book actualizes its title in the second half, when the speaker wrestles with sensuality (a world of “butter and bread and sex”) as distinct from the act of birth and the brute fact of mundane daily life: “we found you in/ the footpath of an otherwise ordinary Tuesday,// day I took piano lessons as a child.” Expertly juggling many of parenthood’s contradictory impulses, Kolbe’s poems thrum with the intensity of brand-new life.
… Though the speaker resists unmaking, she is sinuous, moving like light on glitter: “My needle through the eye // Of the sequin of me.” The Decadent Movement engages the labor of mothering——writing is compared to nursing, both cause “the body / to widen and deepen its reserves, to beef up to / the point of pain.” But Kolbe also delights in the play and power of iterative transformation: “To mother is a power ever to be / repeating.” Motherhood, frequently seen as a moment when doors close, is figured as a capacious state where care opens and transforms. A mother is a power, not a script that flattens under terrible legibility.
Motherhood can be associated with dependent, two-part units: mother and child, mother and other parent, the mother’s body sacrificed to create a new family. But Kolbe, through both statement and form, refuses the collapse of a mother into another body. Her fluid syntax renders the speaker’s relationships with dimension. If three is where mystery enters, three is also where care that does not collapse dignity into basic relational roles begins…. Kolbe’s poems overflow the coupleted “me and baby” logic. While couplets weave through the book, her stanzas mostly disengage from two-part arguments. The tripartite structure consistently complicates rapport….
…Throughout The Decadent Movement, Kolbe negotiates this bright-edged relationship with care: she “will mortify / this bent I have for fetching like a dog. And warp against it, steel myself alone.” A kind of attention to others emerges not from an expectation to lose the self and be “taken up,” but from assurance of her own agency. The book’s fleet syntax documents a mind at work just as much as a body, making space for a relationship with childbearing that consists of more than ceaseless giving of oneself. While the younger speaker was alive with gift in “trinkets, potlatch, relics, little notes,” the speaker moving through pregnancy is alive with gift in another way, yet still reflected in that photographic girl. Language’s transformative capacity enables her to explore conceptions of care that are not subsumed to youth and femininity….
…. For more or less obvious reasons—nepotism, aesthetic subjectivity, demographics—literary prizes rarely go to the “best” book in a given year. Art is not a contest.
To have found its way onto this year’s long-lists, however—recognition which the book deserves—The Decadent Movement would have had to overcome the recent disregard of prize committees for work that centers on what one might generalize as “domestic experience,” including motherhood. I am willing to be proven wrong, but the titles of Pulitzer finalists from the last five years suggest the more epic predilections of such committees: A Treatise on Stars, In the Lateness of the World, Information Desk: An Epic, Ars Poeticas, The Intentions of Thunder. To a certain extent—and with some exceptions, including Tripas and Becoming Ghost—finalists seem to have had to justify their selection with the grandeur of their subject matter.
It would be a mistake, though, to think of The Decadent Movement and many other examinations of motherhood as merely “domestic.” Alongside Glück’s Firstborn, Graham’s PLACE, and much of Eavan Boland's work, the book studies motherhood as, on one hand, an intimate psychological transformation and, on the other hand, access to a kind of cosmic negative sublime. In regard to the latter, Kolbe wonders in “Minus Time” “[w]hy we do not abhor our pre-life, // as infinitely long and thoughtless as our death—maybe it is / our death, mirrored: not mystic but math, my mind // likely as absent in 1789 as 2089.” Kolbe is even more riveting on the former, conducting a stunning interior investigation on what motherhood does to one’s identity as both an artistic and sexual being. In “Three and a Dog,” she writes of her partner that “[w]e bicker on this point and swindle / More from each other, expansive minutes that could / Have bought another line in A.’s novel // Or in this poem.” “I remember,” Kolbe picks up later, “when // I read and wrote all day on the Craigslist table.”
An M.D. who teaches and researches medical ethics at Weill Cornell Medical Center in New York, Kolbe recounts across The Decadent Movement her pregnancy and first year of her child’s life, in reverse chronological order. Neither sensational nor sentimental, the book folds into the poems themselves the latent potential for maudlin “my-child-is-special” schmaltz. Which is to say—part of what I love about this book is its ambivalence, how Kolbe treats motherhood not as a mystical calling, much less as some rebarbative natalist “trad life,” but as a vexing and not necessarily virtuous sacrifice of self, or of the self one used to be…..
…There’s such a lovely meditative cadence to her pieces; such a lovely and carefully precise ease to her lines and phrases and line breaks, taking time even across its own urgency. I’m struck as well in how the poems exist in relation to each other, showcasing where she was within each particular moment, each period of progress or development, evolving backwards through the counterpoint of “A Mother Is a Paperweight” in the first half of the collection to “A Pregnant Woman Is a Scarecrow,” mid-way, and, finally, “A Pregnant Woman Is a Comet” near the end. A book that runs in reverse order towards enthusiasm from exhaustion, stepping with an exactness that acknowledges every moment of slow progress and limited capacity, shifting physically and within a marriage, creating this new member of their expanding family….