Jordemoder: Poems of a Midwife

Ingrid Andersson’s poems are well crafted and passionate at once. They are rooted in her family, her work as a midwife birthing babies in a natural age-old way, her own motherhood and her travels. Her work reveals an identification with and close observation of birds, mammals including herself and her clients, flowers, trees, the seasons. These poems offer both insight and joy. –Marge Piercy, author of On the Way Out, Turn Off the Light: Poems

A Swedish-American midwife is a Best of the Net poet and Pushcart Prize nominee, and has released her bold, life-affirming debut poetry collection.

A midwife is in the thick of it, she sees it all, Jennifer Worth, author of Call the Midwife. It is midwifing in its broadest sense–from releasing a newborn’s stuck shoulders or catching a baby in the caul, to Socratic questioning around body autonomy, social justice and climate sustainability. The poems are layered and bi-cultural, rooted in contrasts between America and Sweden, as well as between colonial/industrial and ecological/relational ways of caring for each other and the earth. With a sense of humor, love, art and aging, Jordemoder is a collection of midwifed hope.

Maw

In the middle of the night, my mother

would bury her face

in her mute, farm-woman’s hands

between the hinged high-fidelity

speakers of our Zenith

record player, the soaring trills

of Verdi’s dying Violetta

vanquishing the dark.

At the end of the opera,

she’d raise her head, revived,

and I learned from the edge

of the living room: life

turns on passion, as much as breath.

In the middle of the afternoon, I learned

not to be afraid of Virginia Woolf

or Hedda Gabler. And now, when

my child goes looking for his mother,

I can explain: it’s in the genes,

or a law of nature, or some

all-consuming love–disappearing

into the maw of entropy and art.