Some poetry books move mountains of language and meaning. This is one such book. According to Greywolf Press, the word blackacre originally meant a “legal fiction, hypothetical estate.” They also say this word is a kind of code among lawyers “marking one’s initiation into…a tradition of legal indoctrination.” This fascinated me at the outset of reading this book because I felt keenly that I was about to step into something I wasn’t ready for.

I didn’t expect to find a book so closely tethered to my own experiences with pregnancy loss and infertility. This collection weaves a narrative of struggle. The narrator wants to conceive a child. But the narrator can’t seem to conceive a child. This collection poses questions and ideas regarding fertility; what does it mean to be barren? What does it mean to have only the potential to carry a child, but not the actual means of it? By that I mean, having the organs to conceive, even if those organs don’t function.

Is not this a “legal fiction?” A “hypothetical estate?” The narrator’s body is this Blackacre, this phantom of in between. The body is the potential without the realization. And so this collection moves into and out of different dreamscapes searching for something the narrator can’t quite find. Or, maybe, it’s something I have been unable to find. “To foster the raw scion as if it were a son; to siphon light down through its body as if it were your own” (pg 81). What does it mean to carry emptiness? What does it mean to desire without the means of satiating?

“Is a ‘true account’ a story or a sum? Is the maker an audience or an auditor?” (pg 73)
“A story has an ending. A sum has a bottom line” (pf 73).
“If only / I were lying still, / pressed to the ground, / I might be taken / for part of the earth, / tilled into the soil / like any other / enrichment, like labor” (pg 12).

I walked away from this book feeling…torn. There is a part of me that knows I will probably never have children, and that part of me lives in perpetual grief and loss. The rest of me spends most of my time ignoring the fact that there will always be an unresolved, unmet desire forever growing, forever yearning inside of me. Because while I know it’s best for me to not have children, I can never and will never be fully satisfied with that reality.

This book left me torn; torn between reality and desire, torn open, and torn from past versions of myself. But it also gave me a sense of honesty in that tearing. Some things cannot be fully mended, and that’s okay.