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.