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FETAL POSITION

by Holly Melgard

Roof Books is proud to publish Holly Melgard’s Fetal Position, a poetic experiment with six forms of labor. Fetal Position employs a range of formal techniques for exploring occasions like the noise of being born as a child’s erotic experience, child abuse, a woman catcalling a construction worker, and the exploitation of child and student labor.

Working through concerns for her own indebted, futureless generation, Melgard’s text shows how the present is mortgaged to the future. Voices, not the poet’s, speak and live: A mother, a full-time employee, a deranged cat lady, an afflicted predator. Fetal Position gives voice to bleak, oblique and obliterated futures. “The fetal position is a meditation on the form,” as the poet puts it, that struggles for emergence against suppressive forces and perennial terrors.

The frenetic pressures of the text move each sequence forward as Melgard pieces together the internal struggles of choosing between a life with and without children. Melgard redefines poetic narration with her deeply moving sentiments of love, family, birth, violence, and hierarchy, ultimately redefining our understanding of what it means to be a human.

People are saying:

“Right. Yeah. No yeah. Yeah no exactly. Holly Melgard writes what it is like to be human, and what it is like to be a cat, and what it is like to not know what it’s supposed to feel like, where language buckles under. She writes the truth.” – Jackie Ess

“In Melgard’s book, a question seems to linger. Something like, is writing a way to be ‘born again’ as offspring are a sort of legacy and generative assortment? Is a so-called ‘labor of love’ the desired outcome? As reader my body answered with gut laughter and unironic tears and absolute admiration for Fetal Position being a ‘meditation on the form.’ A sublimation of a whole cohort’s deferment, this work is a work that reads you back.” – Liz Howard

“What are the differences between labor, laboring, labored, laborious and over-labored? Fetal Position transcribes the sounds and contexts under which labor is birthed, belabored, codified, intensified, exhaled, expelled, taught, expropriated and terminated. To labor is to produce, and the production of labor turns out to be labor also. Here, our labors are transcribed laboriously, oppressively and with violence. A stunning expansion of the labored practices of labor and its underbelly, which happens to be us.” – Tan Lin

The Author:

Fetal Position arrives as Holly Melgard’s first full-length book of poetry with an outside publisher. For a decade she has published on the platform she co-founded and edited, the experimental, collectively run P.O.D. + .pdf platform Troll Thread. She is the author of the Poems for Baby trilogy and Black Friday, and the chapbooks Catcall and Divisions of Labor. With a PhD in Poetics from SUNY Buffalo, she currently works as a freelance book designer and teaches writing at NYU and CUNY.