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.