All the Blood Involved in Love
by Maya Marshall
Haymarket Books, 2022
Review by Kaitlin Hoelzer
On All the Blood Involved in Love by Maya Marshall
At the center of All the Blood Involved in Love, Maya Marshall’s debut collection, is the question of motherhood. In formally-varied poems, Marshall examines motherhood as fraught with danger: the danger of stillbirth, the complexity of adoption, the difficulty of caring for oneself, the violence that is a constant threat to Black and/or queer families, and the old wounds of family history.
Perhaps the strongest portion of the book—at the very least, the most interesting to me—is the poems in which Marshall delves into the ambivalence many feel about having children, the messiness of actual families. The societal expectation that people assigned female at birth will have children is present in the collection; in “‘Why Don’t You Parent a Little,’” the book’s opening poem, Marshall writes, “The story is that there is so much loss, / so much waste in a woman who does not make / a body with her body” (3). This comes into play not to reinforce the necessity of reproductive labor, but to make clear the many layers of emotion and expectation people—particularly cisgender women—experience when deciding whether or not to have children. In “Lavender Menace Considers Adoption,” Marshall interrogates her desire to not have children against the societal guilt she and many other cis women feel for not providing the care labor expected of them. Marshall writes
I have been a woman
for some time now, a uterine cavern,
an acute sense of danger.
…
I do not want to bear a child,
because I do not want to feel
never alone. I’m so American I dream
of children discarded.
What happens to a child detained?
How many can I be a home to? (13-14)
In a similar vein, Marshall acknowledges the guilt cis women often feel in response to others who desperately want children, yet cannot have them. In “For Dawn Wooten,” Marshall writes, “I have the good fortune to be free: / to choose, / to have part of my cervix intact / … whole / enough to make / another whole life” (23).
Despite what I read as the guilt of failing to live up to a societal expectation, or failing to use an ability that is unfairly distributed, Marshall clings to her ambivalence about parenthood. “Some Thoughts on Sons in the Winter of My Child-Bearing Years” ends with the lines “Bless the diva cup, bless the bloody penis. Bless / the boy I haven’t conceived” (7), a celebration not of pregnancy but of the blood that indicates another month without it. The poem describes children as “the corona blistering, / bright, covered in shadows, a circumference of dark flames,” playing on the sonic similarity of son and sun. In “To Deliver All Stillborn Safely,” Marshall figures childbirth as “my nightmare, twin black boys erupt from my pelvis / —through bone, flesh, and pubic hair—” (38). The book may be about motherhood, but in Marshall’s work, motherhood is detached from idyllic stereotype and plunged into messy reality.
These two poems also showcase another vital aspect of Marshall’s collection, which is her constant awareness of the racial violence that threatens her would-be family. In “Some Thoughts on Sons,” Marshall writes, “Where I’m from, / a mother births a son, finds it hard to love an absence. / I have never been a black boy … I ask K— why he doesn’t walk on lit major streets. / He says he is afraid to be outside in his body” (5). Marshall’s Blackness makes the possibility of her potential child’s death imminent, always encroaching. Marshall is not just concerned with the danger her child might face; she is also aware that she herself is always in danger. “American Girl Moves” demonstrates the constant calculations performed by Black women in America—constantly weighing the possibility of racial and gendered violence. Marshall calls herself and her partner “targets on radar” (46), and in “To Deliver,” Marshall notes the racial gaps in maternal mortality in America: “Down the maternity halls black women are dying” (37). Parenthood is infinitely more complex as a Black person, a reality of which Marshall’s collection is well aware.
The complexity of parenthood as a Black person is multiplied by queerness. Marshall addresses queer parenthood through adoption in “Some Thoughts on Sons,” “Lavender Menace Considers Adoption,” “Lavender Menace Adopts a Black Boy” and others. While queerness is more explicit in other poems, Marshall’s series of “Lavender Menace” poems also clearly interface with queerness, since the phrase originated as a pejorative euphemism for lesbians in the women’s movement and was then taken up by a group of lesbian radical feminists. For Marshall, the option of adoption is equally as fraught as pregnancy and childbirth; her imagined adopted son “calls me mother and thief” (6). In short sentences reminiscent of an early-reader children’s book, “Lavender Menace Adopts a Black Boy” considers the economic and racial aspects of adoption: “Adopted black boy is a steal. / $17k. Black boy is waiting. … / is the / softest avocado in the market” (39-40).
Throughout All the Blood Involved in Love, Marshall is always trying to think deeply about her feelings, desires, and choices. Her willingness to look unflinchingly at ethically ambiguous situations and spend time in the tension is one of the things I most value in the collection as a whole. But Marshall also searches for the joy, the beauty, the pleasure in these situations and in life more generally. In “Self-Portrait as a Recurring Reflection Elongated like a Length of Vertebrae,” Marshall writes, “I never forget the beauty in viscera or the pickled parts of things” (19). This line might well be the ars poetica of the collection—Marshall eviscerates, but does so in order to find the beauty.