Holly Melgard, "Repositioning Fetal Poetics: Choices Lost to a Post-Roe America"

This event occurred on:  A reading and talk about depleted agency in Melgard's book of poems Fetal Position, a formal exploration of nascent forms of labor in scenes of their emergence. Fetal Position is a poetic study of different forms of labor in scenes of their emergence such as the noise of being born and transmissions of inter-generational violence. Here, voices speak who Melgard herself is not - or not yet - but who the poet operates in relation to becoming (potential parent, aspiring full-time employee, deranged cat lady, a hurt person automated to reproduce harm), all of whom work to navigate futures in foreclosure. 

Holly Melgard is a poet whose most recent book, Fetal Position (Roof 2021), was named by Jackie Ess as one of Artforum’s “Best Books of 2021.” It is her first book published with an outside editor after a decade of self-publishing on the experimental Troll Thread (TT) press, a born-digital, print-on-demand + free to download, collectively edited press, which she co-founded with Chris Sylvester, Divya Victor, and Joey Yearous-Algozin. On Troll Thread, she is known for having authored the Poems for Baby trilogy (2011), The Making of The Americans (2012), and Black Friday (2012), as well as co-authored with Yearous-Algozin White Trash (TT, 2014) and Liquidation (2017). Her Selected Poems (Ugly Duckling Presse) is forthcoming in spring 2023. With a PhD in Poetics from SUNY Buffalo, she currently lives in Brooklyn, designing books and teaching writing at NYU and CUNY.

Autonomies: A Speaker Series
 
This student-led speaker series confronts the present moment as a crisis of autonomy. Cries for
self-determination and self-governance have never been as vocal as today. At the same time,
infringements on political, legal, and bodily autonomy seem to form the persistent backdrop for a
culture of curated individualism and the search for collective forms. Autonomies proposes that
autonomy exists in the plural; autonomy not as individualism but as community care, as
collective resistance against discrimination and marginalization. It highlights contemporary
social movements, amplifies voices outside of the academy, and realizes spaces for action.
 
“Reproductive Justice,” the first annual theme of Autonomies, seeks to offer a forum for thinking
through agency in the present, after the rollback of abortion rights and other policies that
marginalize people for the fact of their bodies and choices. It asks what justice would look and
feel like in the reproductive field?