Fetal Position

Holly Melgard’ s  Fetal Position  is a poetic experiment with six forms of labor.  Fetal Position  employs a range of formal techniques for exploring occasions like the noise of being born as a child’ s erotic experience, child abuse, a woman catcalling a construction worker, and the exploitation of child and student labor. Working through concerns for her own indebted, futureless generation, Melgard’ s text shows how the present is mortgaged to the future. Voices, not the poet’ s, speak and live: A mother, a full-time employee, a deranged cat lady, an afflicted predator.  Fetal Position  gives voice to bleak, oblique, and obliterated futures. “ The fetal position is a meditation on the form,” as the poet puts it, that struggles for emergence against suppressive forces and perennial terrors.