Minerva the Miscarriage of the Brain by Johanna Hedva

Minerva the Miscarriage of the Brain Reviews

• 
  Sarah Cavar

  FANTASTIC. Review to come.
  
  --
  
  Well, two years later, I realized I never added this review! Here's the link, and a sample:
  
  http://blog.carouselmagazine.ca/usere...
  
  
  
  Minerva is a miscarriage. A refusal of duty. A stoppage of work; a foreclosure of labor. Amid the present-emptinesses scattered between performances and commentary rests recourse to the bodymind itself, tasked with reproducing conditions under which it struggles to survive. Here, too, Hedva turns to dreams, as well as to literary myth and speculative history, to make (non)sense of the embodied reality their doctor decrees: that Hedva “was unable to hold it, the thing, together / that is, [they] couldn’t carry [their child] the right way.” In their own recollection, Hedva cites their dreams of “wolves and elephant heads / [ … ] hands sprouted with tattoos / of long sentences in a language I didn’t know.”
  
  Stitching a litany of M’s –– “moon, mother, magic,” myth and Madness –– Hedva makes space. These stories collect things unseen, as well as things purposefully, temporarily obfuscated –– after all, “for how to disappear / completely and then return, [Hedva has] had the best teachers.” They reimagine giving birth in an ancient cave, attended-to by an anonymous man to whom they speak only in “blood, tissue, dirt, and fluids.” Yet they are also a gender in the body of a mermaid, who neither lays eggs nor has “a little vagina somewhere on her green tail.” Hedva’s mermaids eat sperm, contain the sea, lay dying eggs. In this retooling, the mermaid is a beast, “but beasts are mothers too” –– mothers who refuse to carry.
  
  I ask, after Hedva: How long have we carried our selves, our burdens, our husbands and homes, and have we found a place to set them down? Have we been made / to burden? This is a question to which there is no answer. Instead, Minerva makes one final refusal, this time to the circumstances of their own existence: they did not spring from their father’s head or their mother’s stomach, but from the twisted, attic-bound legacy of Madwomen-passed.
• 
  Pelumi

  CA-Conrad wrote 'A (god)dess-sized reconstruction of the world we only thought we knew! Welcome home poets!'
  
  I was home, and revisited, and revisited, and revisited.
• 
  Aimilia Efthimiou

  Five stars are not even enough for this book! Haven’t had such an intense reading experience for a very long time
• 
  alisa

  some of this is definitely going over my head, though the afterword was really helpful. the third part that deals with misogyny most directly was like. ugh. hit so deep.
• 
  Mari C.L. Murphy

  This is a book that you feel and experience more than you read.
• 
  Sophie

  This book was an interesting read showcasing the development of a young playwright. The photographic elements adds a whole new layer to this personal autobiography of the different plays. I also enjoy the poetry elements as well. Would definitely recommend to any theater or young playwrights out there.
• 
  Jessie Mccarty

  literally brilliant, thats it
• 
  Sof Sears

  a perfect, blistering exorcism!!!!!!!!
  have not felt so gut punched by a book in forever
• 
  Megan Auður

  Devoured this book in one day. Wonderful!