New from CavanKerry, Bridget Bell’s debut poetry collection forcefully achieves one of the press’s missions: to explore the emotional and psychological landscapes of everyday life. 

All That We Ask of You Is to Always Be Happy upsets the apple cart of motherhood with all its connotations of fulfilling “everyday life,” because what is more mundane or more cataclysmic than the early days of motherhood when they are haunted by near psychosis? The poem “This is for the mother (intrusive thoughts)” weaves the horrifying and the mundane just so: 

who shuts her eyes by the microwave
to block the conjured thought of her baby inside

Bell’s collection presents this stunning juxtaposition of chore and horror as it chronicles the journey of a new mother in the days before and after giving birth, and in the years and layered experiences that follow her postpartum depression (PPD) diagnosis. In 34 poems that follow (gently implied) chronological order, Bell explores first pregnancy, new motherhood, psychological disturbance, diagnosis, treatment, miscarriage, and having a second child–this time with all the wisdom of a woman who has been there before. 

The voice of the woman who has been there before is a voice that struggling mothers need to hear. Bell delivers this. 

It is the explosion of everyday life, and the new way of looking at it when a baby comes home, that Bell so keenly pinpoints. See “Origin Stories”:

Our heads hang on our necks
like thirsty flowers, like our spines
are snapped, like we are deep in prayer
to the baby, who has become the only god.

3.6 million women give birth in the US every year. In that intimate postpartum period, as they recover and come to know the needs and curves of their new babies, there is a chance that something else will enter the home. Bell tells us:

2. Audio hallucinations, ghost-cries haunt the cochlea.

This is the second item in the list poem “Root Cause Analysis of Perinatal Mood Disorders.” 

Through medical insights provided in the book, including an introduction by Dr. Riah Patterson, Director of Perinatal Psychiatry at UNC Chapel Hill, the reader comes to know more about perinatal mood disorders. The effect of these medical texts, interspersed with Bell’s devastating language, is that the reader both understands and really understands PPD. You understand the medical context, and you understand how a woman suffering from it feels, as in “Postpartum Depression”: 

a car-shattered deer dragging its broken body
a window painted shut

Bell’s harrowing lines are crafted with visceral image, evidenced by these lines from “This is How You Lose Your Body”:

A geometric loss: linea nigra, vertical stripe that divides
your abdomen into domed halves

and trembling caesurae that drop the reader into the next, not knowing how it ends. But, through the four sections of All That We Ask of You is to Always Be Happy, the narrator finds solid ground, with the help of the very medical providers she quotes and thanks in “Dangerous for Mothers”:

So, I listened, as he told me the plan
to get me better: psychiatrist, Zoloft, support group, Ativan,
counseling,
sleep.

The important work of this book is not just in showing readers how PPD feels; how it looks; but how it can be helped. Through her transformation, the narrator awakens to the everyday of other women; the many mothers yet to be diagnosed or treated; the ones who fell into psychosis; the one fighting intrusive thoughts in a nursery across the street (from “Collective”):

Remember this: you are plentiful,

And: 

This baby is my baby. This baby is my baby. This baby

is not Jesus. This baby is not the devil to ward off
psychosis, the words like anchors weighing you

to this world, you are not alone.

The recurring call to other mothers serves as an extension of CavanKerry’s other work: to make literature accessible to all readers. Bell’s debut will speak to people who are not typically poetry readers with its vivid and accessible poems grappling with an experience so many have had.  

The other common experience Bell writes about, in the book’s single longest poem, is miscarriage. “Co-opting Anne Carson’s ‘The Glass Essay’ to Process My Miscarriage” is 67 stanzas that compose a gripping narrative:

The bright red fact of the miscarriage
arrives on a bench at my kitchen table.
I’m bleeding, I say to my husband.

Here, Anne Carson’s narrative poem is invoked in the title; that narrative unfolds over three days and captures the grief of loss. Likewise, Bell’s poem takes us across a span of time that feels unbearably long as she bleeds and deals with emergency-room delays. The poem is stark and immersive; a page-turner. It is a highlight of the book. 

Weaving the heartbreak of losses–loss of self, loss of body, loss of sanity, loss of fetus–with the regenerative power of time, self discovery, and medical support, Bell’s collection belongs in the hands of providers and mothers and all people touched by the precariousness of new life. 

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