Yes, we published work by Katie Ebbitt in ISSUE THREE. Yes, we are now writing about Katie Ebbitt in our disreputable NOIR SAUNA REVIEW OF BOOKS. Yes, we might even be Katie Ebbitt ourselves (we’re not). What difference does any of it really make if the review performs its little act of promotional servitude and recedes back into the erasure of national consciousness as the new quotidian atrocity moves in swiftly to enervate us? Katie wrote a book called Fecund which (every poet’s current crush) Zan de Parry published through his imprint, KEITH LLC. Zan de Parry wrote a book called Cold Dogs, which we thought about reviewing but the Poetry Project beat us to it, so we won’t now. Anyway, we’re here to talk about Ebbitt’s book, which explores the gendered grief and gravity of fertility. 

In Fecund, the generative, procreative subject is always aware of her position, aware of her potential reification into the object of reproduction, aware of the ethical schisms that open around her feet at the very instant of her own agency. Yes, Fecund is a book about abortion, but no book about abortion is simply a book about abortion. One cannot simply a rose etcetera the subject of abortion because of the deeper systems it is inevitably due to, reliant on, governed by, prohibited from, transgressive of, and so on. Pregnancy materializes the consequences of our sexual relationships, however, that consequence is experienced adversely, almost discriminately, by the bodies that harbor that pregnancy. This, we know, is not a very romantic way to discuss the subject of pregnancy, which alone is replete with politics, but conception is an occurrence, not a miracle, and, for some, it may be even closer to a tragic biological flaw. 

Patriarchal influence inundates our fields of medicine, policy, and canons of prayer. Ebbitt cannot ignore this disparity and seeks a kind of retribution only the poem can offer. 

I pray
he is 
so fecund
fetal limbs
appear 
crater-like
on his
skin

for his 
penis to
expand
so wide
the muscles
straining
to relax

for manhood
not to dictate
a season

Prayer becomes a weapon. The poem becomes a container to act out the pains of fecundity on the executor of its governance, or its spiritual surrogate. The genital space becomes the only location of appropriate retaliation. Ebbitt practices a reverse castration of the male saint. His penis becomes so explodingly big and fertile that it is rendered painfully useless. She has effectively weaponized the grotesquery of masculine sexual hyperbole, the phallus always rendered impractically enormous and priapic, and to signify what? It’s preposterous. 

At the center of Ebbitt’s work is the political question of the body itself, what is housed in its very materials, and can those materials be freed from their relationship to their signifier(s)? Or: 

to take
the organs 
from 
the organs

release 
oneself
to be 
restored 
to true 
freedom

the vanity
to believe 
theory is true

Here there are two abortions, the homuncular pre-life of cells being excised from the speaker’s body, and the speaker’s body itself, claiming object permanence so as to defy the immaterial world of theory leveraged against her. It is a mutual relief, a mutual liberation, an organ freed from its own capacity and from the systemized language which vies to speak for its meaning, thereby deciding its very capacity. Theory is vanity here because it imposes itself onto the spaces of the real, of the consequential, and awkwardly strives to make elegant or conceptualize the slime, sinus, and sphincter of biological passage as a political or social narrative. This technique appears elsewhere in the book: “take a body / out of / a body” she says later, invoking this same symbolic movement, as if an ekphrasis of the abortion itself. If fecundity provokes a barrage of reactions, criticism, expectations, and institutional correction for the sheer existence of biological synthesis, then Ebbitt’s Fecund perhaps offers a retaliatory provocation against the deeper, sinister causations for those very systemizations. 

It is that pregnancy often stalemates the aporia between the material and the symbolic that Ebbitt’s voice is so resolute, as if to be anything else would disappear into the miasmal halitosis of bickering justices, hysterical zealots, covert paternalists, et al. There is something of a postmodern panic in Fecund. We’re both a long way from the tragic conditions that lead to the female deaths in Barth’s The End of the Road or Yates’s Revolutionary Road, and also headlong back into the legislation that preludes these unnecessary tragedies. Furthermore, the advancements in medicine, education, and secularity make this regression all the more draconian, and frankly, absurd. It is not surprising that Ebbitt arrives at “Inside me is / invisible violence / supreme violence / hidden”. This violence would then appear multivalenced, multidirectional,  the potential force that would reject any parasitic relationship, whether a cluster of ontologically debatable materials or the cluster of that ontological debate itself. It is not the abortion itself, then. that is the violence, but everything which surrounds it.

“No easy thing, violence,” Lee-Young Li says in his poem “The Cleaving.” “One of its names? Change. Change / resides in the embrace / of the effaced and the effacer, / in the covenant of the opened and the opener; / the axe accomplishes it on the soul’s axis.” Li also arrives at violence through the filial, but more in the service of the ancestral, his fecundity a subtext that allows for the garrulous overlap of identities. These two poets may be obverse in their relation to the filial (at least in these two particular works), but their approaches to violence seem inspiringly similar. That Li codifies his violence in change, maybe even something closer to entropy (if one were to trace the genealogical changes that occur within the poem), feels propulsively convincing for thinking about Ebbitt’s violence, which vies to retract rather than concatenate, but it is these differences thatteach and guide us. There is still a material concern of action, where it is taking place, and who the arbiter of that action is. Where Li might trace the material to its inevitable explosion, Ebbitt might explode the material instantly to free the form into a broader address. “I came / not for / the wreckage,” she says,  “ but / the story / of the wreck.” However, the narrative, as Ebbitt will address, also contains its own materiality, the logocentricism of the poem adverse to the meaning-making our verbal actions provide, the meaning-making of a hostile shibboleth, the meaning-making of a body at war with systems intent on supplanting it. Ebbitt’s Fecund pulls and pulses and pulverizes all of the attempts to codify the spirit of agency. When she finally arrives at the statement: “I want / the body / of a child,” the reader can easily manifold that body into several different emotional spaces. Is it the prefertile space she desires? Is it the size and innocence of childhood? Is it the child itself? If these questions are merely rhetorical, it is because Ebbitt delivers a true complexity in her work, which never short-circuits, simplifies, or cliches, but unspools like a genealogy of thought, connecting the self back to its own origin of certainty.