A Woman Inflates to the Sound of Applause: On Mackenzie Kozak’s “no swaddle”

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Motherhood in all its iterations is a classic topic for contemporary literature, and with reason. Alongside death, it’s the aspect of the human experience that best straddles the worlds of the potential and the physical; there is much to write about. But what about the invisible state of pre-motherhood, that transitional line between person and parent, which, once crossed, there is no uncrossing? With her new book no swaddle (University of Iowa Press 2025), Mackenzie Kozak tackles, with generosity and formal rigor, the mental burden over the choice of whether to become a mother at all. Though recent essay collections and works of prose (notably Sheila Heti’s 2018 autofiction novel Motherhood, which provides Kozak’s epigraph) have grappled with the heft of the choice, this state of potentiality continues to be a less-observed part of the motherhood narrative, and thus one ripe for poetic examining. It would be very easy to relegate the experience to the realm of the invisible, to not make public the vacillation at all. But poetry, with its allowance for extended metaphor and lateral thinking, is a form uniquely suited for spaces of uncertainty, and now here is a poetic work dedicated to a question that has seemed deceptively small (due to being personal and internal, and due to going underexamined). The question is actually huge in scope: to be or not to be? no swaddle confronts head-on in poetry the existential decision of motherhood.

Kozak makes two significant, immediately visible craft choices in the book. First, the poems have no titles and no capital letters, which has the effect of turning the reading experience into a kind of extended meditation on the topic, and invoking shared intimacy between the narrator and reader from the start. For example, she writes: “just a year in / came the questions, where’s the straw / in your beak, your bulging, that nest?” The lower-case formatting makes this like a whispered conversation to the reader, who becomes a confidante to her frustration. And secondly, the poems are each fourteen lines long: Kozak chooses to employ the American sonnet (invented by the poet Wanda Coleman) as the singular form for no swaddle. The repetition of the form serves as a type of inoculation; the reader knows what to expect with the form, its shape on the page and the way it functions – and so can focus on the continuity of the content. 

The American sonnet is a somewhat recent addition to the sonnet standard, and it’s looser than its Petrarchan and Shakespearean ancestors, adhering only to the fourteen lines as its strict formal guidepost. What makes Kozak’s sonnets American? Is it that they do not strictly include meter and volta in each iteration but rather build momentum as a totality, like the poems of the form’s most recently notable practitioner, poet Terrance Hayes in his book-length sequence Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin? In his book, Hayes’s sonnets are imbued with suspicion against racist American institutions; he repeatedly calls attention to the fact that he is working in the sonnet form as if to illuminate the steely beams holding together the house of American prejudice. I don’t necessarily think that Kozak is suspicious of the sonnet in the same way that Hayes is, but in choosing the American sonnet in particular for her form, she too seems to be writing against the American institution of motherhood. The word sonnet is never mentioned in the book, yet it seems impossible to turn toward the fourteen lines without acknowledging the form’s power. 

It could be that the sonnet’s sizable presence in the poetic canon would contradict the intimacy of the other craft choice, the lack of capitalization, but in this instance I think they play well together, and that too owes something to the history of the sonnet. Paul Oppenheimer writes in The Birth of the Modern Mind: Self, Consciousness, and the Invention of the Sonnet that the sonnet was the first form of poetry intended to be read silently to oneself – “the first lyric of self-consciousness, or of the self in conflict.” Weighing the choice to create new life seems to me both simultaneously massive and intimate a conflict; it is certainly also a politically relevant time to question the choice of motherhood in America. The book is certainly not overtly political, but by selecting this particular form, Kozak turns a private conflict into an existential one and puts her poems in conversation with an entire canon. She turns the topic from private to public while retaining its intimacy, and leverages these two craft choices to do so. 

When I say the book is not overtly political, I do not mean it’s complacent with systems. Kozak often appears furious at the requirement to contemplate the choice when systemically it’s no choice at all. She deploys nature as a metaphoric stand-in for the American patriarchal system that relegates women’s bodies to childbearing and does not regard them individually:  

if my mother’s mother
had not, then what would not be?
which is also the question of cattle or sheep,
wanting to fill the pen.

Kozak places the human question alongside a similar one about animals as a commodity with no individual subjectivity. This also calls to mind the exploitation of motherhood that is the entire meat industry, and serves to remind the reader of “heads” as a measurement. And again later:

if i had gotten pregnant at the age
a woman inflates to the sound of applause. if i had gotten an earful
from nature about my rotting vessel, still, i can’t invent a story where
i carry the doll from room to room, pausing, there, there, with the palm.

This “earful from nature” is a scold that seems to have human intention behind it, rather than being a criticism from the systems of nature itself. Nature, with all its patterns and deviations, is not an instrument of judgment. Calling the body a “rotting vessel” gives the statement even more censoriousness: your physical peak is time-bound and you’re wasting your time with your waffling. Kozak’s transformation of nature into a representative of human patriarchy is particularly interesting because linguistically there exists the notion of nature as feminine – “mother nature” and the like. This move reminds me of today’s political rhetoric and the way gender essentialism is so often propped up against the idea of roles in a natural order: women are women because of their biology, and they have a biological imperative to reproduce. To give nature the role of the critic is to make it decidedly human and decidedly societal.   

What in no swaddle does it mean to be a mother, to mother? Kozak turns her gaze to the mother figures in her own life. 

my mother at the throat of dawn, her head
bent in prayer, and a lotion like honeysuckle
steeps each blanket. and her mother, pouring
gin in a coffee mug, setting the table, asking
for a gun to the head […]

The pious mother up at first light would, alone, be a neutral figure (if a solitary one). But alongside the mother’s mother, alcoholic and “asking / for a gun to the head,” we do not get the sense that Kozak is optimistic about motherhood’s prescribed lineage. She does, though, return again and again to addressing her own mother in the second person, and the tone in these poems is largely not negative: “mother, you had a soothing / for any ail: your cloak, your roof” she writes at the end of one poem. This is an acknowledgement of her own mother’s influence, her great power in shaping the experiences of childhood. 

Kozak also observes other mothers in her peer group: there is the recurring character of the “woman i know who is part mother.” This epithet is interesting: she is primarily a “woman i know” and a “part mother” only second – for Kozak, motherhood is not this woman’s entire identity, even if it is that way to her. Kozak watches this person closely in several poems as she navigates the demands of parenting. In one poem, they are sitting next to a video baby monitor, where, 

on camera,
reminiscent of blair witch,
is smooshed-cheek in crib corner.
to be all surveillance, or one foot
always elsewhere […]

Calling in The Blair Witch Project, a horror movie, makes the narrator’s gut reaction to the situation pretty clear. But she also recoils against the constant surveillance and the need to be split in your identities, “always elsewhere” and thus never present in the moment. 

To finally bring herself to the moment of decision, Kozak also makes the choice to call upon the imagination, and to imagine a life in motherhood. The poems in the collection are often about a lack of something – lack of sound, lack of baby in a room, lack of the titular swaddle, a metonymic device also standing in for the baby – but the collection’s most emotionally adhesive moments come when she allows herself (or her narrator) to imagine a future that could be. Notably, there’s a figure that appears in repetition: the concept of a baby called Lucy. 

i would call her lucy, loulou, little bird. and peel her,
regrettably, from my lush middle, for sleep. lucy,
traipsing through puddles, with the night of my lover’s hair,
holding a leaf, as he tells her, leaf, telling her, starry-eyed,
of the world. and the dark days, the sobbing, boiled water,
hospital bills on the kitchen counter, not giving
as i was given, striving and falling short. 

The tender poems about Lucy first appear a third of the way through the book, and then another nearly twenty pages later, after the reader has absorbed the narrator’s reservations about motherhood. But though there is love between them, and between Lucy and the other parent, even in the imagination the narrator fails to meet her own expectations. In the Lucy poems, the form of the sonnet does some of the work – “lucy, my doll,” Kozak begins in the volta of the poem, shifting from third-person description to an address to the fictional child. “could i ask for your love, / for your pardon, if i do not make you?” I found this moment so strangely full of feeling even though Lucy was a nonexistent child. Certainly the second-person address brings emotional nearness, and the intimacy of the subject matter makes it personal. I had also considered that maybe I’m extra susceptible as a parent – when asked to consider the idea of a hypothetical child, I found myself superimposing the image of my own children. But I don’t think it’s entirely that. I think the device of the sonnet does some of the lift here in moving the poem from the universal toward the personal. This shift from third-person to second mimics what happens during birth: the baby shifts from concept to person in a room. 

This would already be a poignant moment in a singular poem, but Kozak sustains it over another. By the second poem where Lucy is present (midway through the book), we already know Lucy the baby, “waking, clutching the fence of the crib, / holding a rattle to her red gums.” But the Kozak speeds up the time and Lucy grows up in fast-forward in front of us. Lucy is in soccer, bored in class, then “in therapy, / on prozac, popping adderall, flushing pills, staying clean, / meeting a man who worships her, a man who hits her.” The poem ends on Lucy asking for help, “her laugh through the phone, her faint whisper.” Kozak uses the sonnet’s compact power to imagine an entire life. But it’s easy to imagine something, and then choose to pursue it – it’s like visualization meditation, envisioning the desired outcome of your life. I’m sure many people have babies as a result of the affirmative power of imagination – but the power of this particular act of imagining is that the poet still chooses against it: no.