What We’re Reading: Nestuary

Nestuary by Molly Sutton Kiefer (Ricochet Editions 2014)

I’ve had this book on my shelf, waiting to be read for a long time now. Part of that waiting was because I have a never-ending pile of books to read, but I also think part of me wondered if I could relate to a book about pregnancy, when I have never been myself. The verdict? I’m happy I finally picked it up to read.

Nestuary isn’t quite a poem, yet isn’t straight prose — it’s hybrid form of lyric essay in fine form. Sutton Kiefer needles at the acts of becoming and being pregnant to childbirth from countless angles, both in reality with pills and doctor appointments and an unwanted C-section; but also in the format of her prose. This is the weapon she knows best: language, mythology, and poetry. The changing form throughout makes the sometimes difficult subject matter easier to digest and relate to. Some sections are written as straight prose; an account of a doctor’s visit, an explanation of PCOS (polycystic ovary syndrome). Other sections read more like standard poems; some are formatted as imagistic snapshots labelled “fig 1” and “fig 2”; yet others are formatted as dictionary entries:

[fol-i-kuhl]

n.      doctor tells patient, pointing to the screen: chocolate chips in a cookie

adj.   this seems too domestic

n.     distended with air, elongated capsules

n.     a crypt; a cul-de-sac or lacuna

n.     botany: a dry seed pod, splitting at maturity only along the front of the suture, as in larkspur or milkweed

n.     a crypt; a cul-de-sac or lacuna

v.     altered: two centimeters or more and it morphs in name; see cyst

Origin: a shell, a bag, a day at the beach. A ship passing into port, a barrel of wine, an elongated telescope, a shoulder, a name whispered into the night.

Sutton Kiefer doesn’t spare any details. This isn’t a pretty pregnancy story, or an easy one. It’s about shy ovaries, morning sickness, and the wonderment/disgust with the human body. Shame and failure of the female body is a reoccurring theme that Sutton Kiefer grapples with, telling another narrative of pregnancy not so often told in mainstream narratives. (In the second section of the book, she even tells other traumatic birthing stories of women who died giving birth, whose bodies were kept alive just long enough to deliver their babies.)

In choosing to tell this narrative, to put all the vulnerabilities and questions and difficulties of her pregnancy out in the world with this book, Sutton Kiefer is opening her arms and creating a support system for other women and their partners who experience similar challenges in their pregnancies.

Sutton Kiefer isn’t alone even in the pages of her book. Of course there is her husband, ever patient with his “infinite tolerance”. Yet the writer is also accompanied by a collection of literary companions: Greek mythology is used as often as medical terminology, which is used as much writerly references to Sharon Olds, Naomi Wolf, Gillian Conoley, and many more.

Failure begets shame, a kind of powerful, pumping horror. I needed hope, curled against me.

Camille Roy writes, “The relation fo baby to body will be ripped apart and then organized by shame.”

Toi Derricotte writes, “I couldn’t tell where my shame ended and his life began. It was as if my body betrayed me, became evidence against me.”

I felt I had wronged her, somehow. This wasn’t supposed to be our story, was it?

As I read, post-birth, swaddled in absorbent pads that could engulf my newborn’s diapers, my body weeping with fluids, the doctor pushing a cotton swab into my deeply infected Cesarean scar, I discovered I wasn’t alone.

The book is divided into three sections; the first is mostly pre-pregnancy, the second is the pregnancy and birth, and the final is largely post-birth of both of her children. Yet despite this chunking of phases, the prose doesn’t necessarily follow a linear path. The book is more of an immersion into the fluid experience and reflection, a comprehensive and holistic depiction rather than a straight narrative. This is one of the reasons the book worked for me; the format fits the experience, and allowed me as a reader to be in that experience next to Sutton Kiefer, if only for moment.

In the end, Sutton Kiefer shifts from the “failures” of her body pre-pregnancy, to learning the everyday truth of how essential she and her body is to the very existence of her children. The following passage towards the end talks about nursing, and the challenges surrounding her son and daughter’s need for her:

This, my liquid gold. It’s hard to feel this way—valuable—as I listen to my daughter wail upstairs; I have disrupted the family bed. I feel selfish—all three are waiting for my return. What if I stayed down to write this, or, better yet, what if I walked out that door, into the streetlight, naked as I am?

In Nestuary, Sutton Kiefer continually puts herself out in the open, naked and honest about the disgusting, amazing, defeating, awe-striking process of creating, giving birth to, and raising children. She tells a brave narrative, one that sits in my belly contentedly digesting, not because of it’s beauty or perfection, but because of how it finds poetry in the muck of reality.

What other writers have written powerful (and necessary) alternate narratives, departing from mainstream messages of pregnancy, or other experiences?