Natality Paperback – December 1, 2017
by E.G. Asher
Natality is an epic poem, a palimpsestic narrative-body that confronts the tyranny of jealousy by multiplying narrative possibilities at every turn, troubling fixed assumptions of identity through the (im)possibility of rebirth. The biblical figures Hagar and Sarai have been read through a narrative of jealousy as early as the 6th century B.C.E. when Abrahamic lore had its written beginnings. From the fractured grounds of familial, communal, and (inter)national turmoil emanate the voices of Hagar and Sarai in the news, familial lore, Renaissance paintings, video-games, texts, etc. Their voices merge, come undone, lay side by side, untouch, stain, mar, beautify, knot and unknot. Attentive to failure and irredeemable loss Natality unearths ancestral trauma from the past and weaves it thoroughly into the present.
Purchase a copy of Natality here.
“In a stunning debut collection, Asher demonstrates how poetry can offer an intervention into inherited textual traditions, making a corrective gesture on behalf of voices that have been pushed to the periphery. Throughout this extended sequence, Asher deftly and effortlessly carves a space for LGTBQ voices within familiar, and often forbidding, stories of collective origin. “Scripture/ entrails denuded/ arboreal,” Asher writes, as though describing the work’s own movements through psychic and spiritual landscapes. Here, Asher shows that forging a new creation myth inevitably involves some degree of violence and undoing. As the collection unfolds, this simultaneous unmaking and reconstituting of scriptural tradition is visibly enacted in—and at times complicated by—the presentation of the material on the printed page, as the poems drift gracefully between fragmentation and wholeness. Asher elaborates: “Cleft in two,/ laying each half over, against/ the other. But two halves of one/ orev, each a wing passing through them/ in the form of fire.” Juxtaposed with gorgeous lyric fragments, the sequence offers an illusion of unity that comments on the poem’s content. For Asher, form and narrative in all of their artifice serve as the fire that welds history and modernity, the necessary violence that makes way for the new.”
—Publisher's Weekly (starred review)
"Reader, Natality is a rarity in contemporary American poetry—an epic poem. An epic poem whose structure (centered columns of text) and technique (typographical play and syntactical slippage) enacts one of its arguments: a story contains many stories. E.G. Asher pries open the biblical narrative of Hagar and Sarai to reveal renaissance paintings, the personal, philosophy, and even CGI birds. Asher reminds us language is a nexus unmoored from time, bristling with endless possibilities. Reader, this poem is mesmerizing. Reader, read this poem 'to find yourself in the wounds of another,' to hear how 'a voice unstrung from the body is still an instrument.'"
— Eduardo C. Corral, author of Guillotine
“E.G. Asher’s Natality is a visionary narrative built from fragments of 'Abrahamic Lore' and 'nomadic variants of folktale.' It moves fluidly between the mythic wilderness at the heart of scripture and the landscapes of contemporary gender trouble, and does so by reimagining the strained relationship between Abram’s wife Sarai and her handmaid Hagar. Narrated by a speaker who fashions a gender out of the wounds these women deal each other, the psychological violence that binds them becomes both a site of autobiography and also a demonstration of how 'I fabricated my own femininity' out of brilliant artifice. Because everyone needs 'a body to be messy in,' and because that body often belongs to someone else, each of us needs this book as a fearless guide to the kind of intense intimacy from which emerges 'a gold-leafed wolf tenderly tenderly.'
—Brian Teare, author of Doomstead Days
“E.G. Asher’s Natality is a book-length tour-de-force of language, storytelling, and erudition, in which the mythic meets the modern. Throughout the collection, Asher seamlessly weaves rabbinic, medieval, and contemporary interpretations of the biblical account of Hagar and Sarai alongside their own lyric response, creating a fractal rendition of the tale. whether through force of argument or form, the poems in Natality are consistently surprising, restless, and daring in their execution and in what they have to say. In this, their first book, Asher offers a timely and necessary cultural critique—exposing the contradictions and failings at the centre of the Hagar-Sarai story and entreating that we ‘find ourselves in the wounds of another.’"
—Shara McCallum, author of Madwoman