The Decadent Movement

by Laura Kolbe

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Pub Date Sep 22 2026 | Archive Date Jul 31 2026

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Description

A Reverse-Diary in Poems that Chronicles the First Year of Motherhood and Nine Months of Pregnancy, from End to Beginning

The Decadent Movement is a book-length suite of poems that spins backward in time through the early days of parenthood and the preceding nine months of pregnancy. Beginning a year after childbirth in the harried throes of marriage and parenting, the collection proceeds toward its finale “Minus Time,” which marvels at death’s near-identical twin – that infinite period of nonexistence that precedes each new life. From the opening poem “Afterword,” each dated poem slides backward in time, with the poem “Hinge” at the manuscript’s midpoint spoken from the moment of childbirth.

This unraveling of a predicament by playing it in reverse – “Muybridged / out so anyone could see, framed, a woman / running for her life” – allows for rigorously honest accounting of mixed feelings about motherhood and its accompanying physical and psychic changes, detached from the readymade tropes of the “pregnancy plot.”

The Decadent Movement is a book about the fear of loss (of sexual personhood, bodily self-determination, the ability to write, and the license to be headlong and volatile). Yet it is also about the need to insist on new terms of engagement with those we love, new languages of willfulness and desire.

A Reverse-Diary in Poems that Chronicles the First Year of Motherhood and Nine Months of Pregnancy, from End to Beginning

The Decadent Movement is a book-length suite of poems that spins backward in...

A Note From the Publisher

Laura Kolbe is a physician, medical ethicist, and writer. Her poems have appeared in the Best American Poetry series and in American Poetry Review, Conjunctions, Harper’s, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Poetry, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. Her first collection, Little Pharma, won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize and was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Her chapbook Keeping House: Six Longer Love Poems was selected by Kwame Dawes as the Center for Book Arts annual chapbook contest winner. She teaches and practices medicine in New York City.

Advance Praise

"The intricate, barreling, and multifarious poems in The Decadent Movement explore the fraught situation of motherhood with tremendous excitement and frankness. Here is maternity as dilemma and possibility, a cluster of grand yearnings and workaday hazards. The desire to maintain a distinct, inner world comes up against separation as cosmic lostness; and yet, merger is engulfment as well as paradise. All the way through, Laura Kolbe’s self-consciousness about transformation keeps things bracingly restless, playful even, full of pleasure-pain."

-Sandra Lim, author of The Curious Thing

"It is a rare privilege to be inside the mind of this poet as she unspools the chronicle, told in reverse, of the arduous, hallucinatory, and utterly mortal time of pregnancy and early parenthood. With her, we experience the shock of what happens to a body, a marriage, an artist’s mind, as she becomes a mother. These poems are beautiful, intelligent, honest, funny, conflicted, hopeful, and real, and tell us the oldest story in a new and necessary way."

-Matthew Zapruder, author of I Love Hearing Your Dreams and Story of a Poem

"The poems of Laura Kolbe do more than just continue the noble tradition of physician-poets; in The Decadent Moment they redefine the relations between body and body, mind and mind, mother and child. The book’s astonishing final poem is an apostrophe to the not-yet-existent that ‘cannot be studied or moved’ but can be talked to. What bodies can do, and must do, is anticipate lovingly."

-Bin Ramke, author of Earth on Earth

"The intricate, barreling, and multifarious poems in The Decadent Movement explore the fraught situation of motherhood with tremendous excitement and frankness. Here is maternity as dilemma and...

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Available Editions

EDITION	Paperback
ISBN	9780822968368
PRICE	$20.00 (USD)
PAGES	128

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