Book Review

Driven by an infectious curiosity even amid calamity, Mom in Space explores the stunning insights that arise when arranging opposites side by side: the intimate alongside the faraway, the space program alongside the human animal, and mothering alongside civilization. Lisa Ampleman’s third poetry collection imparts stories of inhabiting a woman’s body—particularly a mother’s body—everywhere bodies have been, including beyond the reaches of our Mother Earth’s atmosphere.

As it turns out, the first American women in space were not really there at all:

                                 . . . I thought about
the women on Apollo missions—not
astronauts but centerfolds glued to

window shades and the checklist flipbooks
on spacesuit gloves as pranks. Miss February
in her peach dot matrix was the first woman

to see the moon’s far side . . .

While these women’s physicality was perhaps the most important criterion for their being sent to space, it also ended up notably and literally absent.

Throughout Mom in Space, Ampleman intersperses well-researched poems about space exploration with more personal poems about pregnancy, infertility, and parenting. Sometimes this interspersing occurs in the same poem. In “This Is My Body,” a mother speaks to her baby while breastfeeding: “I give you my body…. I cannot help but feed you the world as it is.” Here, the world includes “paint thinners, / rocket fuel, pesticides” and more such ghastly compounds. It also includes the speaker’s body, itself being a kind of ghastly compound. Already at so young an age, the speaker cannot fully protect her infant son from harm.

The experience of being a body in the world is one of reckoning with harm. Chronic pain from autoimmune arthritis and infertility are two modes of harm that Ampleman explores in this collection. “Reasons for Lack of Success” is a litany of possible explanations for why the speaker is struggling with infertility. “Not wanting a child / with the fervor it deserves,” she posits, only later to add, “wanting it excessively.” Is there ever a right amount of wanting? When it comes to the body, what amount of wanting is ever deemed good, especially for women? In “Secondary Infertility,” defined in a note beneath the title as “an inability to conceive after a previous successful pregnancy,” Ampleman compares pregnancies, and the children they become, to lunar exploration:

and she would slip into an alternate

universe if she could,

the one where she was

the first human to hold

a particular piece of the lunar surface

again, each rock

unlike the last, revealing

different primordial mysteries . . .

Being the first human to hold something, someone, reveals as many mysteries as it invokes. Both parenting and exploration are charged by discovery.

The physical nature of the poems in Mom in Space is also worth exploring in their forms on the page. There are prose poems, some of my favorites of the collection, as well as lineated forms. Many of the latter alternate between left-justified and indented lines, embodying a persistent weaving like that of a two-dimensional double helix of DNA. This form, as depicted in the previous block quote, also embodies leaving the left margin and returning again and again like the life of a mother-astronaut, or really any working parent.

In addition to physicality, Mom in Space also insists on the importance of all the care that is overlooked in American culture’s stories of heroism. Historically, women are excluded from recognition for acts of heroism such as defending the country, going to space, and demonstrating against injustice. But, as Ampleman reminds us in “Domestic Concerns,” “The work of civilization / is also laundry.” Even when women begin to be valorized for efforts already recognized as heroic, the cultural conversation skews toward more stereotypical pursuits. In the prose poem “Neil and Me and Work and the Body,” the speaker recalls:

 “You’re going to have to write mommy poems now,” a male classmate told a friend when he heard she was pregnant. I watched another guy’s eyes glaze over as, in the midst of the work of pregnancy, I read from an essay about worrying my baby would die, about returning again and again to an online forum where one mom posted regularly about her late miscarriage in process.

The poet experiencing pregnancy is told she has to write “mommy poems” as if there were nothing else a mother might want to write about—or, if she does write about being a mother, her poems are dismissed with that moniker by men whose eyes have glazed over with apathy.

In the poem “Try Staying Home,” six sections share the stories of important women in the history of space exploration. One section quotes an interview with Anna Lee Fisher, the first mother in space in 1984, about her operating a robotic arm to “frisbee-toss a satellite into space,” and to devastating effect: “‘How does operating the arm make you / a better mother?’ a reporter asked before the flight. / ‘Oh, I don’t think it did,’ she replied.”

Mom in Space is a smart, sincere book full of incisive humor, gutting imagery, and a remarkable wielding of poetic form. From prose docupoems to sparse lyrics, Lisa Ampleman’s prowess is on full display in this lively collection.