Nancy Reddy's Pocket Universe explores how the world becomes more wondrous and more perilous in the permanent after of parenthood. The collection begins in the public hospitals in sixteenth-century Paris—where women giving birth were as likely to die of fever as go home with healthy newborns—travels through the dizzying world of Instamommies and celebrities who effortlessly got their body "back" after baby, and ends with children singing at a bounce-house birthday party. Poems set those intimate, ostensibly domestic matters against weighty questions about human origins, our place in the universe, and the pervasive historical and present-day violence against mothers and children.
Pocket Universe traces an arc from the challenges and bodily horror of the first weeks home with a new baby, through the wonder of watching that child discover the world, and finally to the hard-won joy of motherhood.