PSALMS OF UNKNOWING

Lanier offers a collection of poems addressing motherhood and religion.

This body of poems straddles the delicate creation of new life and the unpredictability of death. The author begins with a poem about pumping breast milk at work (“Pumping Milk”). As she stands topless in the office, she contemplates the strange dichotomy of her identity: “half of me is made / for spring break gone primal, / the other half / will write a memo. / Is this what it means / to be a mother? The self, split.” She complains about a walk interrupted by someone pushing free Bibles and ponders a looming government shutdown while marveling that her body houses “someone thirty weeks in the making / and already a heart beating” (“Bed Rest”). Bizarre stories (a bear takes police on a wild chase) mingle with tragic ones (police violence against Black men). She imagines what Jesus doodled in the sand, adopts the point of view of Eve, and wonders about the Virgin Mary’s experience of pregnancy. As critical as the poet is of religion, she also acknowledges that “science / can’t state a single / thing sturdily” (“ ‘Jesus Might Have Walked on Ice,’ Scientists Say"). Lanier’s metaphors are masterful. Her pregnant body is “a bulbous / water-slow clock of waiting” (“The Making”). A baby has “Q-tip toes of a newborn” (“Only a Sliver of Love Runs Hot”). Of pumping breast milk at work, she writes, “I’ll soon hook up / with plastic trumpets, turn on / my motor, get milked.” Her descriptions are visceral and unique—in “Bed Rest,” a midwife “cranks / the metal beak” of a speculum during a prenatal exam. Lanier’s truth telling is bold and vulnerable. Following her father’s death, she writes, “Grief wails the first year, but by the seventh / it whispers. The quiet is maddening” (“Ode to Seven”). She captures the ambivalence and anxiety of motherhood accurately; nearing the end of her pregnancy, she writes, “I’ve tried, for your sake, to love / this state” (“Forecast in the Thirty-First Week”).When the poems veer into politics, however, they lose a little magic.

A powerful poetic reckoning with motherhood and religion.