40 Weeks by Brittney Corrigan

Rarely do I read a book of poems in one sitting, but from the very first lines of this beautiful new sequence by Brittney Corrigan, my heart kept singing, “Yes, yes,” and I was hooked. Never have I seen the wonder and joy, the “unbelievable/disbelief,” of pregnancy described with such informed tenderness. Nor have I seen a more perfect suiting of form to content: tight, lyrical, sonorous couplets that balance and intertwine, with dazzling imagery, the physical growth as well as the growing cognition – week by week – of both fetus and mother. “You tip/the scales of my heart,” Corrigan says to her unborn child, as she moves closer to giving birth. Reader, these poems will tip yours.

–Ingrid Wendt, winner of the Oregon Book Award and author of Evensong

 
In 40 Weeks, Corrigan steeps the reader in a fresh cosmology of wonder. Through a bright, clarifying lens of witness and image, these poems sing the startling secrets of invention onto the page, into the body, into the world. I felt inhabited by these poems, returned to that fierce absolute of maternal welcome, cocooned in the tidal and timeless mystery of mingling, then dividing. I wish I’d had this collection of poems to initiate me into my own, 40-week transformation.

–Sage Cohen, author of Writing the Life Poetic

Rating: ***** [5 of 5 Stars!]