Review: Mom in Space by Lisa Ampleman

As a college English professor, poetry was my specialty. I happily devoted much of my attention and many of my waking hours to writing poems and critiquing the work of others. 

Since leaving academia due to chronic illness and intermittent disability, I have fewer hours of wakefulness, and my attention is far more sporadic. 

In this state of cognitive scarcity, poetry is the genre I read and write the least. What I thought would be my life’s work sometimes feels like the stuff of another life entirely.

Reading Lisa Ampleman’s latest collection, however, reminded me what poetry can do and why I need it in my life now more than ever. 

Reading and reviewing this slim, 126-page volume took months in my current condition, but it was worth every minute. 

Note that I've attempted, though not always successfully, to retain the book's original formatting when quoting from it. 

Prose selections appear in quotes. Poetry appears indented in stanzas. Brackets and ellipses indicate I've omitted the first few words of a line.

Now available from LSU Press, Mom in Space interweaves the history of the space race with the author’s family history and personal experience of motherhood, secondary infertility, and chronic illness.

I’ve never once pondered how being a mom is like being an astronaut, but after reading these poems, I can’t help but see the connections.

“Birth” explores how blasting into space and bringing a child into the world both evoke a mixture of excitement, awe, and abject terror. 

Both require immense physical exertion, the severing of the deepest connections, and a willingness to risk one’s life, though the dangers of pregnancy are so often minimized. 

Both involve the anticipation of a breath—a baby’s first or an astronaut’s next—that’s in no way guaranteed.

The book draws parallels between the literal near vacuum of space and the metaphorical near vacuum of raising a child in isolation during a pandemic.

Women in individual nuclear families are similarly sequestered from one another, unaware of how many others struggle with infertility and miscarriage because they’re encouraged to keep their pain private.

As the poet observes in "Billboard":

        [...] There is no

            Empty-Cradle Club.

        If there were, the code of conduct      

            would be Say nothing

        to friends and family, avoid

            spreading the disappointment.

Many of Ampleman’s poems occupy the liminal space of the neither here nor there, the almost but not quite.

An all-female cosmonaut mission is planned but never launched. A daughter is conceived but never born. A planet is teeming with life but devastated by climate change.

“Lunar Deceptions” acknowledges the mixed reactions when chronic pain and infertility collide:

        […] Sometimes, now I'm

        relieved I don't

        have to parent-through-pain more than one

        child.

        Sometimes.

Poetry, like fiction, is never limited to describing real events exactly as they happened.

Yet, what stands out most about this author is her skillful curation of reference materials, from medical journals and anthropology textbooks to NASA recruitment videos and museum exhibits.

These citations create their own kind of lyricism, bringing science and history to life in ways nonfiction rarely achieves.

Ampleman reveals that the story of humanity’s race to the moon and beyond is also the story of social inequality, racism, and misogyny. 

For every Neil Armstrong, there were many astronauts who weren’t chosen or even considered for a shuttle mission due to their race or gender. 

Mae Jemison, the first Black woman in space, was assaulted by police officers upon returning to Earth.

In 1969, the Poor People’s Party protested against the Apollo 11 mission, arguing that government funding for space travel was better spent combating poverty closer to home.

The speaker of “Rotation” tells her son:

        [...] I want you
            to be able to hold two opposing
        truths about yourself consonant,
            the dread and the rapture.

Ampleman asks the same of her readers, never shying away from conflicted emotions or ambivalence. One poem refers to an unruly toddler in the waiting room of a fertility clinic:

        Nonhypothetical, 
            noisy, you are what 
        we bystanders 
            do not hope 
        and hope for.

This dichotomy is perhaps most evident in “This Is My Body,” in which a pregnant mother addresses her unborn child:

        […] Little
            dude, I give you my body, 
        fat and fluid retaining; my blood, 
            altered, which will carry 
        your own cells, microchimeras,
            till they lodge in my organs. 

        I give you sugars and proteins, and, 
            in minor doses, paint thinners, 
        rocket fuel, pesticides, flame 
            retardants. I cannot help 
        but feed you the world as it is, even 
            what I would rather not share.

In her lyrical prose essay, "Neil and Me and Work and the Body," Ampleman shares her experience with spondyloarthritis, an autoimmune disease that causes widespread inflammation and joint pain.

Having experienced chronic pain and read many accounts of it, I found Ampleman’s description both familiar and surprising.

I related to her discussion of how chronic illness impacts not only what we can do but how much or how frequently we can do it:

"I realized my loss of joint flexibility wasn’t just aging when my neck lost its curve, so I couldn’t kiss my six-foot husband for longer than a peck without needing to straighten out again. If I hold his hand too long while we watch a movie, my knuckles get stiff. 'Too long' is often just ten minutes."

Those of us who suffer from stiff, swollen joints fantasize about floating effortlessly in zero gravity. However, the poet rejects this romantic notion, sticking to the laws of physics:

"My joints hurt if the barometric pressure falls more than three-tenths of a degree, my synovial fluid more susceptible to change. In space […] I would ache, stiff as a store mannequin who needs another’s hand to move her, just one joint covered in Neoprene-coated nylon and white Teflon, move it just a little, then another."

This claustrophobic, dissociative feeling of limited mobility and diminished autonomy is one I know well. 

However, I’d never considered how the problems of having an immune system that mistakenly attacks itself as an alien pathogen might be similar to the challenges astronauts face when they become the resident aliens on the International Space Station.

Scott Kelly, for example, survived 340 days in space only to contract a multitude of ailments upon returning home. Essentially, he became allergic to Earth.

Chronic illness, whatever the cause, can make us feel as if we are unsuited for life on our own planet.

Lisa Ampleman’s Mom in Space reminds us that even when the Earth no longer feels like home, we are never alone. In fact, we have more in common with astronauts, the most singular of individuals, than we ever thought possible.