The intimate privilege to be allowed inside the poet's mind is a startling experience that goes line by line. It almost feels like I am overstepping my bounds, that is how palpable each poem is in this book that goes beyond what I envisioned pregnancy and birth to be like. I also fine myself pulled to each poem; not a line is wasted and each thrums with intention.

Thank you to NetGalley & the University of Pittsburgh Press for granting me access to this ARC.

Most narratives of pregnancy and motherhood move toward birth as their inevitable destination. The Decadent Movement does the opposite, retracing its steps from the chaos of early parenthood back through pregnancy and toward the profound mystery of existence itself. The result is a collection that feels less like a memoir than an excavation.

The reverse structure is more than a formal experiment; it becomes a way of interrogating memory, identity, and transformation. By moving backward through time, Laura Kolbe strips away the familiar expectations attached to motherhood and asks readers to reconsider what is gained, lost, surrendered, and remade in the process of creating a life. The poems refuse sentimentality without sacrificing tenderness, making space for ambivalence alongside devotion.

What impressed me most was the collection’s intellectual and emotional precision. These poems are deeply concerned with embodiment — the ways a body changes, becomes vulnerable, becomes shared, and yet struggles to remain its own. Questions of autonomy, desire, creativity, marriage, and selfhood surface repeatedly, creating a portrait of motherhood that feels startlingly honest in its complexity.

Kolbe’s language is exacting and richly layered. Images arrive with the clarity of remembered dreams, while individual lines often carry emotional weight far beyond their brevity. There is an attentiveness to both physical experience and philosophical inquiry that gives the collection remarkable depth. Even its most intimate moments gesture toward larger questions about mortality, time, and the fragile conditions of being alive.

I was particularly moved by the way the collection frames birth not simply as a beginning but as a hinge between forms of existence. Throughout the poems runs a persistent awareness that every arrival contains traces of absence, and every transformation requires a relinquishment of what came before. “The fear of loss” may animate the collection, but so too does the possibility of discovering new ways of inhabiting oneself.

Readers who appreciate contemporary poetry that is formally inventive, intellectually rigorous, and emotionally unsparing will find much to admire here. This collection will likely resonate especially with those interested in motherhood, bodily autonomy, memory, and the intersections between personal experience and philosophical reflection.

The Decadent Movement understands that becoming is never a single event. It is a continual unraveling and remaking, and these poems capture that process with remarkable grace and clarity.