National Poetry Month Celebration: Adrienne Gruber
Our National Poetry Month Celebration continues with Adrienne Gruber, author of Q & A.
Gruber’s third full poetry collection is a poetic memoir detailing a first pregnancy, birth and early postpartum period. The poet is both traumatized and transformed by the birth of her daughter. She is compelled by the dark places birth takes her and as she examines and revisits those places, a grotesque history of the treatment of pregnant and birthing women reveals itself.
“To give birth, to bear life—to release and capture that experience in words: this is the crystalline achievement of Q & A,” writes Marianne Apostolides, author of I Can’t Get You Out of My Mind. “Gruber’s poetry resonates in the hollows of my body, in the fear and hope that accompanies motherhood.”
Gruber reads “Answers,” a poem from the collection, in the following video:
Answers
It has been almost a year
and now I sit
in a coffee shop
read Our Andromeda
for the third time.
In the moment of peril
the last heat of push
some cry for God
some for love.
We are taught
that God is love and
I can believe that, I don’t
care either way.
I named you.
My love. My love.
Those final five seconds
a noose slipped
around memory.
I siphoned the last
drops of viable water
to quench
an insatiable thirst.
Some call out God
during sex
or birth or even
in death but I said
Love. Love
with every force
of my being.
(Remember to follow along all month as we celebrate our poets by sharing a poem each day on the Book*hug blog. Follow us as well on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram.)
Adrienne Gruber is the author of two books of poetry, Buoyancy Control (Book*hug) and This Is the Nightmare (Thistledown Press), and five chapbooks. She won The Antigonish Review’s Great Blue Heron poetry contest in 2015, SubTerrain’s Lush Triumphant poetry contest in 2017 and has been shortlisted for the CBC Literary Awards, ARC’s Poem of the Year contest, Descant’s Winston Collins Best Canadian Poem contest and Matrix Magazine’s Lit POP poetry contest. In 2012, her chapbook Mimic was awarded the bpNichol Chapbook Award. Originally from Saskatoon, Adrienne lives in Vancouver with her partner and two daughters. Q & A is her third book.
