“no branch, no leaf, no fruit”: writing about infertility and assisted reproduction in the poetry of Monica Youn’s Blackacre (2016) and Allison Cobb’s Green-Wood (2010)

Smith, Carrie ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1977-2612 2024. “no branch, no leaf, no fruit”: writing about infertility and assisted reproduction in the poetry of Monica Youn’s Blackacre (2016) and Allison Cobb’s Green-Wood (2010). Contemporary Women's Writing 18 10.1093/cww/vpae017

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Abstract

Barren, sterile, infertile. How does a female poet navigate these culturally inherited metaphors and descriptions of their bodies and experiences? This article argues that the upswell in contemporary poetry exploring the many facets of infertility and assisted reproductive technologies (ART) demands consideration as a new strand of writing. This new strand creates new linguistic, poetic infertile subjectivities by adapting, challenging, rejecting, and co-opting inherited cultural linguistic tools. By examining how two contemporary female writers have explored the language and cultural symbolism of assisted reproduction in their poetry, this article considers how their innovative and iconoclastic approaches to cultural and linguistic commonplaces ask us to re-examine our assumptions about the topic, ultimately arguing that it is precisely their interrogative process that defines the poetry itself.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Published Online
Status:	In Press
Schools:	English, Communication and Philosophy
Subjects:	P Language and Literature > PN Literature (General) > PN0080 Criticism
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
ISSN:	1754-1484
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	14 June 2024
Date of Acceptance:	4 March 2024
Last Modified:	16 Sep 2024 23:55
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/169742

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