Reproductive Poetics: Infertility and Mediation in Monica Youn’s Blackacre

Abstract:Poiesis, or the process by which something comes into being, is gendered, particularly when it pertains to writing poetry. The fraught connection between the language of creation and embodiment is thrown into sharp relief by Monica Youn’s poetry collection Blackacre (2016), which deals with pregnancy, reproduction, and infertility. This article explores the body as a site of mediation in the poems of Blackacre, which shows how the supposedly inherent reproductivity of women speakers’ bodies mediates their use of poetic language, even—or especially—when the poetry is about the absence of that reproductivity. The figure of the hand, in place of the more gendered womb, manifests the relationship between sensing bodies and written text. Tracing this figure through Blackacre, I demonstrate how an understanding that mediation is creative and productive reveals the source of gendered poietic anxiety: an uncomfortable metonymy between women’s bodies and the language of creation.