The Rumpus Poetry Book Club chats with Cynthia Marie Hoffman about her new book, Paper Doll Fetus, twilight sleep, and the importance of giving voice to the voiceless.
When she becomes pregnant while grieving her newly dead father, Amy Monticello rejects the comforting notions she's offered about completing the cycle of life.
"I wanted to be sexual/sexualized, but not fetishized. But was becoming someone’s fetish the only way? How was being fetishized different than being desired for having a unique, unrepeatable shape...or would the one leg always and forever be the only thing that mattered?"
We were then young girls and our want was written on our skins. Between our legs and along our necks and wrists, our skin craved friction and more friction.
The cool story would be how we went home that night, dropped everything, booked our trip, and were soon having a threesome...under the ocean spray that endlessly cascades over San Sebastian’s horseshoe beachfront. But that isn’t what happened.
I clutched the uneven wooden arms of my beach chair and felt hopelessly in love with everyone, this assemblage of trash-talking deadbeats who insist they are too old to still work at a snack bar but come back year after year, even though they’ve been saying to hell with the place ever since they started.
My husband went back to work, and then my mom flew back to Florida, and it was just me and the baby. Alone together, but no longer the us we had been when I was pregnant.
Before giving birth to her first child, Hannah Gersen had hoped to find an anthology of birth stories. At The Millions, Gersen writes that Labor Day is just what she was seeking, though she didn’t discover…
Writer and illustrator A.K. Summers's new graphic memoir, Pregnant Butch, looks at the increasingly common but still underrepresented experience of queer pregnancy with humor and complexity.
In her deeply personal essay on The Millions, Allison K. Gibson explains some of the intense literary cravings she experienced during her pregnancy. Some of them were unexpected, even violent,…