Little Astronaut by J. Hope Stein Review by Shannon Nakai

Little Astronaut by J. Hope Stein

Review by Shannon Nakai

Publisher: Andrews McMeel Publishing

Publication Date: September 20, 2022

ISBN: 1524872202

Pages: 96

In 1979, Medbh McGuckian won the British National Poetry Competition under a male pseudonym. Upon learning that the poet of the prestigious award was a pregnant woman—deemed unfit for the image of a serious poet—the committee moved to rescind half of the prize money and award a co-winner.

In Little Astronaut, J. Hope Stein dispels this notion. Each poem unabashedly ushers the reader into the exhausted world of leaking nipples, C-section stitches, cabbages in the bra, midnight slow dances with a relentless newborn, spit-up in the hair, and anal sex on borrowed time with a husband who also lives “under the oppression of a little tyrant.” With unflinching deadpan scrutiny aimed at the postpartum body, Stein celebrates becoming food for her daughter. She tenderly likens the bond between mother and child, its trajectory in each one’s orbit around the other, to her motif of an astronaut in space: adventure that demands a complete orientation around a life source. Her lines resonate with well-attuned references to the raw pain of overworked nipples from constant nursing, nights filled with whale songs and fairy wonder, and the symbiosis of a child to her mother, even as she grows. Stein’s life, her body, her time table, all respond to her daughter. Yet, she eschews the dirge and scourge against such self-effacement as is typical on the subject of motherhood. Instead, Little Astronaut sings to the magic a child creates, the discovery of fierce and primal love as the speaker becomes more than a point of origin, but a whole world—earth, sand, and space—for another human to dwell.

The “prologue,” a singular poem entitled “maternity pants,” alludes to the introductory nature of a life before a child’s birth. This is not to dismiss the woman before the mother, but rather signals the cosmic, often comic change that radically occurs once a baby enters the picture. Here Stein sets the tone of a speaker who does not, who cannot, take herself seriously. “I always look a little pregnant / but this is ridiculous,” her opening lines state as she observes the pregnant body and all its contradictions: growing belly and nipples versus the “hormone-soup & sleepless” libido of a college freshman. The vegetarian versus the craving for hot dogs. The needs of the self, versus the demands of the other bound into the self. “I am the silly result of blood flow,” she declares, “…When it flows to my uterus / I am a poem.” In all her tongue-in-cheek self-deprecation, Stein nonetheless locates the lyricism behind the laudable, a Whitmanesque celebration of the body in its miraculous new form and power.

However, Stein does not wax poetic about the discomfort and dislocation of new motherhood. In “A toast to the third arm,” she describes the “underwater” feeling of sleep deprivation all while her whole existence undergoes a shift: strangers broach her private orbit to lend helping hands or unwanted criticism. Many poems pay homage to her breasts: she guards them while offering her newly tender body in sex but offers them around the clock to her newborn. Her sleepy wordplay in “lullaby” suggests the state of constant nursing. The word “milk” appears six times in five stanzas, but only once as a noun, showcasing the hybridity of a nursing mom’s life as milk becomes adjectival to everything. The demand is constant: she is sipped “as day-bread,” reminiscent of the divine daily obligation for provisions. Stein’s wordplay also invites the reader into the physical mechanism of nursing: the cadence of her wordplay, “suck in the dusk-hour” and “turtle-tide,” circles and curls the lips into the shape of suckling.

The following poem, “A Toast to the Crooked Nipple,” depicts the cost of a symbiotic existence. She has no need for a thermometer “to tell the temperature, / because we are always touching.” In the next stanza she notes that “we look like one person.” The body marked by C-section and tiny fingernails becomes a testament of love for her daughter. “I hold her all night and the scar that is a smile speaks / to the scar that is a moon.”

The titular motif of the astronaut vaulting around Earth is a vantage point the speaker also knows in her vigils feeding her child, recalling Milton’s “wide womb of uncreated night.” An all-night audience, she, too, sees “the pyrotechnics of fireflies, luminous as cities” like what “astronauts see on the dark side of earth. / Humans shimmering like stars.” At night, her daughter’s drool launching:

         its way from the interstellar of her mouth

         to my nose-tip

         (never been kissed like this)

         is a connection

Yet this is ultimately not a grievance, but gratitude. In “A toast to something beautiful flapping in the wind,” the speaker marvels, “Everyone is sleeping / except Oona and the ocean. / Oona and the ocean.” And when she takes her steps, “She learns to dance before she learns to speak – / and when she hears a song she recognizes / she waves hello–.” Stein’s poems speak to the profundity of motherly love. With delicate reverence, she chronicles pregnancy after loss—dreams for and celebrates an embryonic life at 12 weeks, or the insistent undertone of love in the midst of miscarriage as, right now, “Right now, the baby’s dancing.” Stein also includes scenes of mother and daughter building sandcastles on a beach, the daughter claiming “this is your power.” Stein never loses her humor. She compares the ache of engorgement during weaning to blue balls and takes nude pregnancy photos of herself with indifferent shamelessness: “Release them I don’t care—release them for science.” She unceremoniously heralds the milestone one-year birthday with the comparison of a mylar balloon to a golden boner.

Little Astronaut praises the magic of maternal love. She watches in wonder as her daughter weans from breast to cup, as she writes “OONADAD” on the sidewalk to indicate the triune connection and direction of love among family. The daughter’s bond with the father and the simultaneous love of child and father for the mother now coded in child-speak: “OONA and DAD love you-ch’other.” Stein falls in love with the “holiday” sound of running feet. She revels in the miracle of a bond that something could grow on her—often depicted literally. “I cannot let her magic not work,” she states in the first “morning, mommy” poem. Here, the daughter literally wields a magic wand to summon her exhausted mother out of bed, but the summoning, the little girl’s power, has started long before.

Other poems allude to the miracle, the transformation of mother’s love. “I never loved my body until she was inside it,” she confesses in “Body, I never knew I could love you;” “I didn’t know anything could grow on me or for how long,” she marvels in the poem “My daughter brings me a rock and says: this is your power.” While there is a literal presence of magic in the daughter’s make-believe play, Stein responds to an intrinsic miracle that has left her changed. In “morning, mommy,” she rises from the bed, “because her magic works.” To end her gentle love letter, “Before you were born, a magic trick,” Stein writes:

         but know this: your life belongs to you

         & our time together

         it has already begun.

J. Hope Stein is a poet and the author of Occasionally, I remove your brain through your nose (Poet Repulik, 2017) and The New One (Grand Central, 2020), a collaboration of prose and poetry between her and her husband, Mike Birbiglia. Her work has also been published in the New Yorker and Poetry International. 

Shannon Nakai is a contributing editor for The Cortland Review and a poet and reviewer whose work is also featured in The Cincinnati Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Los Angeles Review of Books, Heavy Feather, The Atlanta Review, Cream City Review, Cimarron Review, Colorado Review, and elsewhere. A Fulbright Scholar and Pushcart Prize nominee, she works for and with migrants and refugees with the International Rescue Committee. Find out more at shannonnakai.com.

4 October 2023