Letdown by Sonia Greenfield
White Pine Press, 2020
Letdown, Sonia Greenfield’s collection of prose poems, revolves around Greenfield’s experiences with pregnancy and birth, her child’s seizure disorder and autism diagnosis, motherhood, and secondary infertility.
Greenfield’s choice of the prose poem is well suited to the material: the boundary-blurring nature of the form reflects the boundary-blurring nature of motherhood. The numbered prose poems call to mind journal entries or entries in a date book; they unspool in the chronological yet intermittent way a life is recorded in such documents. Each poem is a complete moment, and added together Letdown tells a complete story, but the movement from one poem to the next reveals their fragmentary nature and the fragmentary nature of life with a small child.
Greenfield’s examination of secondary infertility (an inability to conceive again after a live birth) is remarkable in its exploration of a grief that is seldom discussed. “One can barely call it a miscarry when what is carried is just a speck of desire embedded in blood,” Greenfield writes in No. 47, and yet the disappointment – the letdown – at the sight of blood on the toilet paper again is real, another sign of “time dripping into the bucket of my own infertility. No more babies for me – this news personal, this news that breaks hearts, this news again about who has, has not, or God forbid, didn’t want” (No. 45).
Grief over these early losses is compounded by mother-guilt: “From Connecticut to Washington to California, every place I fled to, all the mothers I’ve met have assumed responsibility” (“Forward”). After a high fever leaves her son seizing, she writes simply, “The Tylenol didn’t work when I was told it would. I’m sorry” (No. 16). She interprets a dream to mean “I’m always at least half-convinced every decision I make for you must be the wrong one” (No. 41), the “you” being the poet’s son who has been diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder. After another bright spot of blood on the toilet paper, Greenfield writes, “[f]orgive me, but on very bad days I have to push away this feeling: that I was cheated out of a second chance to get it right” (No. 39).
Greenfield explores her grief over her planned delivery turned cervix-ripping trauma; her son’s seizures and Autism and the well-meaning but hurtful comments of others: “we always thought he seemed a little off” (No. 37). She also explores the luck of a diagnosis, by which she means both the randomness that this child has autism while that child doesn’t and the good luck of receiving a diagnosis that can lead to therapies which will give her child better tools for living. All of this Greenfield negotiates in poems that are lyrically beautiful and searingly honest. And sometimes, as she writes in No. 62, “It takes a while to strip expectations away, to peel off the layers until we’re holding our child’s happiness in the palm of our hand, as pure as the simplest silicate material, and to then say it is enough.”
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Jennifer Saunders is the author of Self-Portrait with Housewife (Tebot Bach, 2019). Her poem “Crosswalk” was awarded First Prize in the 2020 Gregory O’Donoghue International Poetry Prize and appeared in Southword; her work has also appeared or is forthcoming in The Georgia Review, Ninth Letter, The Shallow Ends, and elsewhere. Jennifer holds an M.F.A. from Pacific University and lives in Switzerland.