My Aunt’s Abortion, by Jane Rosenberg LaForge
Review by Joe Haward October 2022
Published by BlazeVOX [books], Buffalo, New York.
5/5
There is nothing more powerful than the human story. Since the dawn of humanity we have sat together, often over a shared meal, and spoken of our own history and beginnings. Every one of us has a moment, or collective moments, that somehow shape us far more than anything else. That sense of being shaped is found when looking back, unaware at the time of the significance of the events unfolding around us, and reverberating within us. These defining times are always relational, sculpted as we are by community and its history. Like the ancients retelling their own history as the night’s fire danced in their eyes, people shaped by those before them, passing on the stories so that who they are would never be forgotten, we continue this tradition in our own communities and in our own way. In My Aunt’s Abortion, Jane Rosenberg LaForge, through poem and essay, shares the depth of a particular human story, alongside a family story, its own fire reaching out and touching the lives of others.
My Aunt’s Abortion opens with the eassy, “Narrative Reproduction,” introducing the reader to Rosenberg LaForge’s aunt, her story, and the background to the collection. As we listen to the aunt’s story of an illegal abortion sometime in the late 1960s, Rosenberg LaForge catapaults us into the present day, and the overturning of Roe v. Wade and the banning of abortion across many American states. As Rosenberg LaForge highlights, “state regulations and other factors effectively outlawed a facet of women’s health care that was supposed to be protected.” That we are living in such a time as this, where one of the largest democracies in the world has removed the rights of women, makes My Aunt’s Abortion even more pertinant and powerful.
Made up of thirty-five poems, and two essays (“Narrative Reproduction,” and “The God(s) that Failed”), My Aunt’s Abortion takes the reader through an intimate journey of family, loss, confusion, regret, joy, and reflection. Rosenberg LaForge speaks through the eyes of her childhood, and about her childhood through adult eyes. As such, we get these wonderful moments where sight, taste, and smell are the cauldron of memory;
“On his own he sought the cinnamon
he said would ease his diabetes;
as a child he chewed on sticks
like some tough guy with a cigar,
a stevedore or a gangster; as an adult,
he sprinkled it in his tea, though
it had no effect on his vitals.”
The figure of the father permeates this collection, vivid and powerful, drawing the reader, not only into another world and family—their own challenges and happiness, an aroma rising up from each poem—but also into inward reflection upon your own childhood and experiences.
But ultimately this is the story of the aunt, a woman who was flawed and adventurous, glamorous and in pain, passionate and unhappy. Her character bursts from the page, and we feel her idiosyncratic ways, the impact she had upon the family, the way her story shaped the family story.
The poems testify to Rosenberg LaForge’s ability to share, not only her story, but the story of many women, many families, each carrying the wounds and scars that relationships (and time) inevitably produce. There is a power in My Aunt’s Abortion that will stay with the reader long after the final page.
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