- Olivia Brooks
- 5 days ago
- 3 min read
“To you astronauts”: A Review of Lisa Ampleman’s Mom in Space
by Cici Liu
Poets are star-lovers by nature. Lisa Ampleman is an astronaut. Her fourth book of poetry, Mom in Space, published by LSU in 2024, explores the rough and alien terrains of motherhood, in/fertility, God, and the cosmos. Rendering the quotidian at the level of mythos and cosmology at the level of material science, Ampleman’s newest collection blasts off in a breathtaking journey through joy and grief, galactic and terrestrial, holy and profane, poetry and prose. In its own words, the collection asks to hold “two opposing / truths about yourself consonant, / the dread and the rapture” (30). So Ampleman does, in the altered gravity and atmosphere of life beyond Earth, where everything seems infinitesimally small and infinitely large.
Flipping through the poems, images of the moon in three phases divide the book: waxing crescent, first quarter, full. Sandwiched between the crescent and the full moon is an essay titled “Neil and Me and Work and the Body” — ostensibly about Neil Armstrong, first man on the moon, but also about this: “I guess we all like to be recognized not for one piece of fireworks but for the ledger of our daily work” (55). Mom in Space is where that “ledger” gets the fireworks. In “Supermommy,” mommy is not super because of superhuman powers but because she “brings her children squares flavored like cheese” (47); In “Rotation,” dropping her son off at school becomes “our entire solar system // hurtling on its orbit around / the galaxy” (31). Mom in Space is a book of outrageous metamorphoses, where asteroids become giraffes (41), Lisa becomes the Laser Inferometer Space Antenna (67), babies become God (15), and the quotidian attains the level of “myth, a cautionary tale, a hagiography” (48). Ampleman enters the realm of heightened imagination to make the tedium of daily life not only bearable, but epic.
On the flip side of the coin, Mom in Space contextualizes unbearable grief and infinite joy in the daily ledger of suffering. She writes: “I kept thinking my sorrow was something special, / but it was extraordinarily common” (50). Ampleman the astronaut is not weighed down by gravity but by chronic pain and struggles with infertility, which feels as though “the marrow of any possible joy” has been sucked out, but is nevertheless an all-too-common tragedy: “My deepest sadnesses are completely ordinary” (9). Even the exhilarating singularity of space flight, real or imagined, is beset by the proliferation of ordinary poverty. As the Apollo 11 mission lifts off in July 1969, Ampleman focuses not on the rocket but on “the Poor People’s Campaign / across fields near Cape Canaveral,” the mundane inequality of society all around the excitement of that decade (26). As much as this is the book of the ordinary becoming extraordinary, it is also the book of the large becoming small, the book of bird-eye views. Consider the image from the penultimate poem of the book: “blue pearl crests above a lunar waste- / land,” Earthrise from the moon 238,900 miles away, the world and its troubles becoming no larger than a marble.
Really, Mom in Space is the book of commonalities, the mutual joys and sorrows as we reach for the stars, each in our own ways. While the rest of us poets and readers stare at the night sky as a place of unreachable wonder, Ampleman assembles her vessel and crew and takes off. She is the poet of getting there rather than being there, of astronautics rather than astronomy, of “the ledger of our daily work” rather than “one piece of fireworks” (55). Everyone who strives is an astronaut. Ampleman, the spacewoman with spondyloarthritis who is “stiff as a store mannequin who needs another’s hand to move her,” strives for motherhood and home as much as the crew of Apollo 11 strove against gravity for the moon. What Lisa Ampleman and Neil Armstrong (and I and you) have in common is not only their love for the stars but also their being “early and ardent reader[s]” and their daily work (56). We star-lovers, ardent readers, daily strivers; of course we found each other. Imagining her place in an era when it seemed the task of mankind to reach for the stars, Mom in Space reminds us of the labor and joys that we have, by saturating them, forgotten.
CICI LIU is a graduate student of English at Florida State University. She received a bachelor’s degree in English with a concentration in Poetry Writing from the University of Virginia. She is currently working on 18th-century material culture and reception studies.
LISA AMPLEMAN is the author of the poetry collections Full Cry and Romance. She is the managing editor of the Cincinnati Review and the poetry series editor at Acre Books.