Pocket Universe

<p>Nancy Reddy's <i>Pocket Universe</i> explores how the world becomes more wondrous and more perilous in the permanent <i>after</i> of parenthood. The collection begins in the public hospitals in sixteenth-century Paris--where women giving birth were as likely to die of fever as go home with healthy newborns--travels through the dizzying world of Instamommies and celebrities who effortlessly got their body back after baby and ends with children singing at a bounce-house birthday party. Poems set those intimate ostensibly domestic matters against weighty questions about human origins our place in the universe and the pervasive historical and present-day violence against mothers and children. <p/><i>Pocket Universe</i> traces an arc from the challenges and bodily horror of the first weeks home with a new baby through the wonder of watching that child discover the world and finally to the hard-won joy of motherhood.</p>