Seen variously, as if through multifaceted glass,motherhood and its impossibility are the subjects of Eleanor Kedney’s Twelve Days From Transfer. An infertility painstakingly and candidly scrutinized, considered and reconsidered, imagined and reimagined—the resultant poems offer no simple answers and no easy relief, but they hold within them—fire-forged from years of pain—the bright gems of catharsis. To open this book is to accept the invitation to a difficult journey, but it is a journey of insight—insight surpassed only by bravery. I’m thankful for these poems.
–Christopher Nelson, Blood Aria
Ripe as a pear-shaped uterus, the poems in Eleanor Kedney’s Twelve Days From Transfer are manifestations of obsession,desire, and motherhood. I’m grounded in the narrative of infertility but, again and again, carried toward hope—unplanted tulip bulbs on a car seat, gray moons of embryos, and the souvenir dish from the fertility clinic that held those unborn promises. With lyric and narrative skill, Kedney articulates the urge toward planting, grieves failed attempts at pregnancy, but buoys her readers in dreams fulfilled—the husband who adores her and the sponsored daughter and son in India who sustain her. These poems document the universal urge toward procreation—extraordinary measures that exist in plant and animal kingdoms. Everything a newborn. / Everything bare-kneed. I step away from this book understanding what it means to accept the limits of the body. This is what itis—to be fully human.
–Robert Carr, The Heavy of Human Clouds
We were named witches begins Eleanor Kedney’s tour de force Twelve Days From Transfer, in which the poet breaches the taboo subject of the unfruitful womb, a woman’s inability to conceive. In the title poem, Kedney allows the reader not only into the in vitro fertilization process,but the privacy of her own body, layering details with the precision of the 1½-inchneedle, and the cumulative effect is emotively unforgettable. Like eggs bound / by sperm, Kedney binds the medical/scientific language with a lush poetic and creates a new whole. Twelve Days From Transfer’s impassioned understatement and luminous natural world observations elevate these poems into the realm of the timeless. Radiant, intimate, fired with compassion in the kiln of great pain, Ipredict acclaim and an enthusiastic readership for this collection.
–Stephanie Dickinson, Blue Swan Black Swan: The Trakl Diaries