Q & A

Adrienne Gruber’s third full poetry collection, Q & A, is a poetic memoir detailing a first pregnancy, birth and early postpartum period. The poet is both traumatized and transformed by the birth of her daughter. She is compelled by the dark places birth takes her and as she examines and revisits those places, a grotesque history of the treatment of pregnant and birthing women reveals itself.

Praise for Q & A:

To give birth, to bear life-to release and capture that experience in words: this is the crystalline achievement of Q & A. Gruber’s poetry resonates in the hollows of my body, in the fear and hope that accompanies motherhood. -Marianne Apostolides, author of Deep Salt Water

In Q&A Adrienne Gruber annotates the condition of the pre- and post-partum body, training her ruthless poetic eye on division: cell by cell, mother from daughter, fact from misguided historical tendency. Is this a love poem / or a poem of grief? / When we make something / we lose, she writes. Throughout these poems and their namesake childhood interrogatives, fluids course, sutures tear, ducts leak. Gruber’s ability to command the language of sublime physicality draws motherhood’s grotesque fears close, turning them over like an infant on a lap, examining perfections and dangers with intimate scrutiny. -Elee Kraljii Gardiner, author of Trauma Head and serpentine loop