About the Book
"Ingrid Andersson's poems are well crafted and passionate at once. They are rooted in her family, her work as a midwife birthing babies in a natural age-old way, her own motherhood and her travels. Her work reveals an identification with and close observation of birds, mammals including herself and her clients, flowers, trees, the seasons. These poems offer both insight and joy."--Marge Piercy, author of On the Way Out, Turn Off the Light: Poems
A Swedish-American midwife is a Best of the Net poet and Pushcart Prize nominee, and has released her bold, life-affirming debut poetry collection.
"A midwife is in the thick of it, she sees it all," Jennifer Worth, author of Call the Midwife. It is midwifing in its broadest sense--from releasing a newborn's stuck shoulders or catching a baby in the caul, to Socratic questioning around body autonomy, social justice and climate sustainability. The poems are layered and bi-cultural, rooted in contrasts between America and Sweden, as well as between colonial/industrial and ecological/relational ways of caring for each other and the earth. With a sense of humor, love, art and aging, Jordemoder is a collection of midwifed hope.
Maw
In the middle of the night, my mother
would bury her face
in her mute, farm-woman's hands
between the hinged high-fidelity
speakers of our Zenith
record player, the soaring trills
of Verdi's dying Violetta
vanquishing the dark.
At the end of the opera,
she'd raise her head, revived,
and I learned from the edge
of the living room: life
turns on passion, as much as breath.
In the middle of the afternoon, I learned
not to be afraid of Virginia Woolf
or Hedda Gabler. And now, when
my child goes looking for his mother,
I can explain: it's in the genes,
or a law of nature, or some
all-consuming love--disappearing
into the maw of entropy and art.
About the Author :
Ingrid Andersson has practiced as a home-birth nurse midwife for many years. She studied poetry and literature in Swedish, German, French and English, as well as anthropology, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, before mixing that fertile ground with the art and science of midwifery (Frontier Nursing University, 2000). Ingrid is a healthcare activist and founder of related nonprofits. Her poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net and has appeared in Ars Medica, Eastern Iowa Review, Literary Mama, Midwest Review, Minerva Rising, Plant-Human Quarterly, Torrey House Press, and elsewhere. She lives in Madison, Wisconsin with her Swedish-Finnish husband, son, dogs, chickens and bees. Jordemoder is her debut collection.
Review :
"In these generous and musical poems, Ingrid Andersson is midwife to the lives of the young of this century, compassionate observer of the joys and sorrows of her family's and country's troubles, a wise-woman companion on old-world tour, literate in our history of failure to address our earth's problems. In her celebration of the earth's fecundity, she births the hope that we could be better, start anew."--Robin Chapman, author of The Only Home We Know: Poems
"These are poems that celebrate life, that give a luminous, shimmering attention to what it means to birth, to mother, to age, and through it all to notice the white-tailed bumblebee."--Juliana Spahr, author of That Winter the Wolf Came: Poems
"Introducing something precious to the world is hallowed work, and we imagine Ingrid Andersson derives slightly more pleasure from fulfilling her midwife duties than those of a poet. Her study of German, Swedish, French, and English poetry, in addition to anthropology, at the University of Wisconsin, further roots the many beautiful ideas in this debut collection."--ForeWord Reviews (March/April, 2022)
"At the heart of Jordemoder is the crossroads where the midwife works, the knife edge where a breath taken, or not, determines a celebration of birth and new life, or the loss and grief of death. Andersson inhabits that crossroads and writes from there with precision, empathy, and grace."--Wisconsin People & Ideas (Spring, 2022)
"'Cardamom buns baked on parchment, /percolated coffee in thin-lipped cups, /a porcelain pitcher of cream...' In this heartfelt debut collection, Ingrid Andersson's lush observations often made me feel that I had walked into a Vermeer painting, with all the attendant beauty and restraint that implies. Her viewpoint is fresh and modest, her basic stance that of a midwife in the literal and metaphoric sense. The tenderest poems are reserved for the poet's mother, beginning with a depiction of her in hard labor 'pinned like an insect/on her back, leather straps/around her ankles, wrists.' Because Andersson writes without a hint of sentimentality, we believe such humbly offered insights as this one: 'Love after fifty is like love before//the age of five, unable to contain itself.' Time and again, these poems transform the most ordinary objects and events 'into something noble and whole.'"--Enid Shomer, author of Shoreless: Poems
"Ingrid Andersson's poems are well crafted and passionate at once. They are rooted in her family, her work as a midwife birthing babies in a natural age-old way, her own motherhood and her travels. Her work reveals an identification with and close observation of birds, mammals including herself and her clients, flowers, trees, the seasons. These poems offer both insight and joy."--Marge Piercy, author of On the Way Out, Turn Off the Light: Poems
