T. Gondii

Renowned performance poet and survivor of fierce mental health battles Nina Belén Robins takes a long, hard look at the idea of bearing and nurturing children, and decides to remain child-free.


Every step of her decision is fraught with pain. Fighting off the powerful internal pressures, the madness that can seize a woman in her fertile years, battling the forceful external pressures -- the boyfriends who envision her as a vessel for passing on their genes, the boyfriends' mothers who consider grandchildren to be their rightful due.


She pleads with the doctors who insist she doesn't know what she knows, who refuse to perform the procedure that will free her from the terrors of unwanted and untenable conception.


She is forced to endure the onslaught of thought-free comments by friends and colleagues. The unwavering pressure of therapists and mentors who assure her that motherhood will transform her, their claims that her childhood anguish and explosions were aberrations, that her children will not repeat her history or bear her scars, that her temper and limitations will somehow disappear with the birth of her children.


In 27 ferociously-honest, startlingly-witty and brilliantly-concise poems, Robins demonstrates the sensitivity that drives her to protect her unborn children, the love that she lavishes on the man who marries her for herself, the cats who delight her by day and comfort her by night, and the attention she pays to us, her readers -- the lucky recipients of her poetic gifts.