"Infertility" by Wendy Chin-Tanner

[View this email on a browser]( [Forward to a friend]( [facebook-icon]( [tumblr-icon]( [twitter-icon]( September 24, 2019 [Infertility]( [Wendy Chin-Tanner]( You end me like a period ends a sentence, ends a line. [Like this on Facebook]( [Share via Twitter]( Copyright © 2019 by Wendy Chin-Tanner. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on September 24, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets. ["Infertility" by Wendy Chin-Tanner]( About This Poem “In between the births of my two daughters, I experienced two miscarriages and two years of fertility treatment. Some time later, I was teaching a creative writing workshop on short form poetry and ‘Infertility’ emerged as a response to a prompt examining aspects of Poem 9 ‘I broke your heart’ and Poem 62 ‘You are, my dear’ from [Vera Pavlova]('s collection If There Is Something to Desire: 100 Poems. While writing it, this poem revealed certain aspects of the experience of infertility that had not been legible to me until that moment—the way in which for women, infertility evokes discourses of legacy and mortality. In our culture, we are socialized to believe that the legacies of men are forged by their deeds and accomplishments, whereas childbearing is the primary way in which women leave their marks upon the world. This poem grapples with the misogyny of these discourses and dramatizes the second-wave feminist credo that ‘the personal is political.’” —Wendy Chin-Tanner [Wendy Chin-Tanner]( Wendy Chin-Tanner is the author of the poetry collections Anyone Will Tell You (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2019) and Turn (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2014), which was a finalist for the Oregon Book Awards. She serves as a poetry editor at The Nervous Breakdown and executive director at A Wave Blue World, an independent publishing company for graphic novels. She lives in New York. [more-at-poets]( [All the Great Territories]( Poetry by Chin-Tanner [Anyone Will Tell You]( (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2019) “I Could Be a Whale Shark” by Aimee Nezhukumatathil [read-more]( “Prayer with Miscarriage / Grant Us the Ruined Grounds” by Geffrey Davis [read-more]( “October 14—The Dow Closes Up 10015” by Susan Briante [read-more]( September Guest Editor: Eduardo C. Corral Thanks to [Eduardo C. Corral](, author of Guillotine, forthcoming from Graywolf Press in 2020, who curated Poem-a-Day for this month’s weekdays. Read a [Q&A with Corral]( about his curatorial approach this month and find out more about our [guest editors for the year.]( Your Support Makes Poem-a-Day Possible Poem-a-Day is the only digital series publishing new, previously unpublished work by today’s poets each weekday morning. This free series, which also features a curated selection of classic poems on the weekends, reaches 450,000+ readers daily. [make a one-time donation]( [illustration]( [Small-Blue-RGB-poets.org-Logo]( Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit [Poets.org](. You are receiving this e-mail because you elected to subscribe to our mailing list. If you would like to unsubscribe, please click [here](. © Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038