Mackenzie Kozak examines the complex question of whether or not to bear children. Through a series of untitled American sonnets, the poems speak to themes of origin and desire, noting the shame that can accompany such a decision. Many poetry collections speak to the varied griefs of becoming a mother, losing a child, or being unable to have a child, but this collection gives specific voice to another grief that feels unspeakable: the possible conclusion of not wanting to be a mother.
no swaddle reads as a sort of meditation on theme, its repeated form mirroring the spiraling nature of indecision and reconsideration of the same major question alongside its continuous struggle to name. In the end, this grappling with elements of grief and shame becomes a way of moving toward greater agency and fulfillment.
“no swaddle is an elegant, rough-beautiful portrait of the existential, metaphysical, material, and political question of whether to become a mother. Yes, it’s a portrait of a question. For a woman, this question has always been posed as definitive: her very being, every measure of who/what she is defined by the answer. A pivotal, wide swath of her years are named ‘childbearing’ whether or not she uses them this way. This book reclaims that question, refuses the ordinary answers by positing a self as the portraitist. The speaker of the poems is now imagining and drawing the question on her own artistic and spiritual terms. The poet goes deeper into the conversation, beyond labels and roles and into a secret garden of research, real lives, and wonder, where the poet seeks to balance mind and heart, history and hope, eros and ennui. But Kozak is not interested in leaning on the line dividing polarities—that’s the mother/not mother coin. The poet knows there are more than two sides to even the most intimate question. She seeks more questions; she cannot be reduced or satisfied with agendas dressed like answers. There is so much unknown, in the world, in the realm of love and connection, and the poet feels a responsibility to explore it with an almost painful, exquisite clarity: ‘as I walked reckless towards myself, toward shadow.’ no swaddle is a book of love poems, sensuous and serious, and this brilliant poet sees no need to legitimize love by attaching an object to it, to make it her ‘own.’ Poet Kozak knows the women, mothers, sisters, others, and lovers are all in a deep pool of experience with her, and her role is to know and feel and experience and connect, diving, splashing, sinking, circling, gleaning, gleaming. What loving, generative, wise perspective to emerge with.”—Brenda Shaughnessy, judge, Iowa Poetry Prize
“It’s not enough to say no swaddle bellows with grief, rage, and desire. This debut finds the distressing dialectic and questions involving self and motherhood and from there grows lyrical and beautiful writing. ‘My furnace is blank and lukewarm,’ Kozak writes, but these tender and alarming sonnets light impossibly bright.”—Eric Tran, author, Mouth, Sugar, and Smoke
“It is a joy to find a first book so formally assured, lyrically graceful, and, above all, deeply moving. Intense in its portraitures, no swaddle addresses the ‘riddling of doubts’ that lodges in young women about motherhood, a riddling that is both luminous and agonizing—and a subject rarely seen in contemporary American poetry. There are no false flourishes here. No lifeless words. No automatic emotions or bogus postures. In poem by poem—in this compassionate, humble series of blazing sonnets—Mackenzie Kozak’s intelligence is as daring as it is dignified. no swaddle is a pilgrimage into consolation and beauty that breaks and salves the heart.”—David Biespiel, author, Republic Café
