A Review of In Vitro: On Longing and Transformation

“My psychoanalyst begins our session by saying that the desire to be a mother isn’t the same as the desire to have a child.” When I read this line, in a book-length essay by Mexican poet Isabel Zapata, I hear the echo of another line with an acutely similar shape: “The desire to die is not the desire to be dead. Anyone who has ever been in love knows this,” says Jericho Brown, in a recording of a lecture I listened to some months ago. Is it fair for my mind to link these lines? One concerns the desire to make life; the other, the desire for life to end. Maybe they speak, if from opposite directions, into one shared void: the space between condition and action, name and object, thought and touch, estar y ser, living and life—the space where so many of our griefs begin.

Reading Isabel Zapata’s sparks of thought, collected throughout the author’s process of in vitro fertilization, I am brought to the edge of many voids. Her fragmented prose chronicles the experience of becoming pregnant, of giving birth, of early motherhood. We are witness to the misogynistic horrors of the medical-industrial complex and to the gendered cultural imaginations of motherhood. The book recounts not only the anticipated birth of Zapata’s child but also the death of her mother. Though her work appears, in moments, to be a remembrance of the past, it could also be regarded, in other moments, as an act of dismemberment: hopes, beliefs, desires, and expectations come apart in Zapata’s spiraling lines. We are given a telling of daughterhood and motherhood that doesn’t shy away from the jagged, the unfathomable. We are never spared the difficulty of the body or of the mind. 

Some English-language readers may be reminded of Maggie Nelson’s fragmentary style when reading Zapata’s work, though Nelson herself reminds us that “fragments are as old as the hills, which are fragments of mountains.” Paragraphs sit like islands in white space, occasionally accompanied by watercolor renditions of ultrasounds, or by medical charts. “No ancient civilization could resist the allure of using imaginary lines to connect the little shining dots that appeared in the night sky,” Zapata reminds us at one juncture in her prose. She must have known that her readers, too, could not resist the pull to imagine the lines between her shining paragraphs, to cohere the incoherent, to sew her...