Skip to content

Visit our Christmas Gift Guide and enter your member code for 25% off. Last Post 18th December!

Fruits of Labour by Betty Doyle PRE-ORDER

Regular price £6.00

Unit price per 

only 0 left in stock

NB: Individual book orders to Europe are shipped Delivery Duties Unpaid and customers in the EU may have to pay local import VAT and customs duties in the receiving country. This doesn't apply to quarterly member mailings.

Published 21st October 2024. Available for pre-order.

Betty Doyle’s Fruits of Labour charts coming to terms with childlessness, from initial symptoms and diagnosis, grief and uncertainty, to emerging with acceptance, hope, and survival. Doyle explores the impact of childlessness, and the threat of infertility on the speaker’s sense of self, femininity, and family. While initially the body is examined from a place of shame and regret, it also becomes a site of resilience and abandon. There is joy here, too – in the unexpected freedom that childlessness brings. Doyle rejects enforced gender roles, embracing independence and freedom of choice. While the body in these poems can be a site of suffering, or even viewed by some as deficient, it is also defiant, and ultimately, these poems emerge triumphant, surviving and thriving on the speaker’s own terms. Being childfree is complicated. Poems like ‘Are all the babies in your poems real?’ outline external societal pressures which drive the speaker to wish for a child. Though the impossibility of that wish is initially met with shame, shock, and regret, Fruits of Labour finds relief, hope, and finally acceptance.

MEMBERS ENJOY 25% OFF ALL POETRY BOOKS

JOIN NOW

Join the Poetry Book Society for 25% off all books

Close (esc)

Popup

Use this popup to embed a mailing list sign up form. Alternatively use it as a simple call to action with a link to a product or a page.

Age verification

By clicking enter you are verifying that you are old enough to consume alcohol.

Search

Your cart is currently empty.
Shop now