Stories to Read Aloud to Your Fetus

In search of a new epistemology to address the fetus, poet Alina Stefanescu draws on her experience as an immigrant from a totalitarian country to probe the body’s most ineffable borders. Her story-poems acknowledge the complexity of the female body— and the fertile terrain between its possibilities and vulnerabilities. An intimate geography of the relationships between female bodies and their babies, whether bourne, born, or unborn, these are the tongues kept silent in polite social circles. These are the women no one talks about. These are our mothers, sisters, wives, neighbors, and lovers. This is life.