Window for a Small Blue Child

Science and technology face off against ancient images of fertility in this fascinating sequence of poems about the author’s experience of in vitro fertilization. Spanning 48 hours, some of the poems provide narrative and others concentrate on images; some offer passages from medical textbooks and others allude to folktales and myths. Scanners, timers, petri dishes, and sterile instruments predominate in the description of the procedure itself, but all the while the narrator’s thoughts are slipping away to gardens, dreams, and large questions about risk, choice, and biological destiny.