The Voyage of Parenthood: A Review of LITTLE ASTRONAUT by J. Hope Stein

Little Astronaut by poet J. Hope Stein captures the wonder, joy, and isolation of new motherhood. The title compares the psychological experience of parenting an infant to traveling with a small crew aboard a spaceship, and several pieces convey and build on this metaphor, including "Lullaby for Voyager," "A Toast to the Dark Side of Earth," and, of course, the short titular poem.

The poems in Little Astronaut reflect a variety of emotions, from the humor of a child's public announcement in a natural history museum that "monkey-people have boobs!" to the sweet reflection that a mother holding her infant daughter can look like just one being in the bathroom mirror.

Stein doesn't shy away from the earthy: we see how pregnancy affects her sex life, the cabbage leaves she uses as a remedy for excessive milk production while weaning her daughter, the songs they sing to poop while toilet training, and the occasional cuss word. The "gross" is occasionally intertwined with the hilarious: "Daddy, don't drop your penis in the toilet!" and the tender, in a poem where Stein races to remove cat poop from the baby's mouth, and at the close of the piece, scars on different parts of Stein's body "speak" to each other as she sleeps holding her daughter, who will not sleep in her crib. This reflects the experience of parenting in its physicality and sweetness.

Yet, her work reflects sophisticated knowledge of and fascination about many aspects of the world: space exploration, fetal development, evolutionary history. And, a deep tenderness towards her little family, including her husband (who does the dishes!) and especially her tiny daughter, Oona.

Motifs of fanciful childhood imagination are scattered through these pages. A rock becomes a symbol of power. Stein wakes to tea parties, fairies, confetti, and glitter. She also engages in her own adult fantasies of being cast in a movie by a famous director (as well as fears, as she recollects the "universal cinematic language " of miscarriage). Yet, sometimes, in the same pieces, ordinary rocks, seashells, and dirt get mentioned right alongside the fairy dreams. Our actual world can be just as amazing as fantasy, especially when seen through the eyes of a child.

Poems here are of varying lengths: some extend over multiple pages, and others consist of two lines. This reflects Stein's versatility as a writer and also the way thoughts and emotions occur to us while we have an intense experience. Sometimes, there's a lot to say, but other times, one sentence is more than enough.

The quick vs lengthy bursts of thought also recall and evoke Stein's space travel metaphor. Time is measured differently in space due to the varying orbits of planets. Days and years as we understand them can be minute or nearly eternal elsewhere in space with Earth's migration as a reference. So, as we "spacewalk" through Oona's early childhood, there are naturally a balance of short interjections of feelings and observations and longer periods of reflection. And sometimes, during the toddler years, "every number on the clock is replaced by the word now/and the hands of now always pointed at two nows."

As explorers might spend extensive time solely with each other for company, the little family develops their own language of love. From the earliest newborn days, Oona's little mouth resembles a parenthesis, a device to hold and contain the sounds and words she will eventually say.

Some words in the pieces are modified to reflect the toddler's way of speaking. The three create their own music when Oona's tiny hands slap her father's belly like a drum. In one rich piece, at three years old, she writes "Oonadad" in bright pink on the driveway with her own self styled punctuation, exclaiming that the word means that Oona and Dad love each other very much.

This collection follows the Steins through Oona's learning to crawl (An Infant Reaches) through the baby's first steps and eventually to her walking and dancing. Stein references dancing in several poems, from the relief she finds from her doctor's announcement that the baby is healthy and "dancing" in her womb to a piece where her husband plays guitar and sings lullabies to Oona and the three dance together. Dancing is something people do for fun when we're happy, which this family is, but also a metaphor for navigating a complex situation, losing and regaining balance, which is part of the physical and psychological journey of parenthood.

Themes of food and nourishment also run through this collection as symbols of love and connection as well as sustenance. Stein relates her own hesitation at weaning Oona from the breast "a little less and a little less, and then no more/but tonight, a little more." She becomes wistful at the close interaction her daughter has with a cup that covers her face as she sips.

In a later poem, she reveals her poignant reason for her reluctance to wean: psychologically, she does not want to give up her ability to nourish her daughter from her own body without depending on the unpredictable outside world. Even grounded on Earth, life can be unpredictable: she’s vulnerable to her own memory and planning lapses as well as to economic and political threats.

Of course, human growth, as well as space exploration, requires separation from the known and the familiar. Oona must eventually step out of the "mothership" for a spacewalk of her own. A section, "tethering," references the parents' process of letting Oona grow while still nurturing her under their care.

The final poem, "The foot" highlights the motif of watching a child grow. Stein reflects that Oona used to be a "ceramicist/molding the elasticity of her skin." Now, at three, her daughter is more than half the length of her body as the two curl up together in bed. Yet, her foot still massages her mother’s stomach as they sleep, although now from the outside.

Like the recordings and images on Voyager 1 and 2, which make appearances in several pieces, children are "probes" we send to the greater world out beyond our own existence. In this way, the baby becomes a "little astronaut" traveling through time.

J. Hope Stein's Little Astronaut is a complex yet relatable ode to parenthood. It highlights the joy and wonder of bringing small children into the world, an experience both personal and cosmic.

Trauma Becomes Tender in Paul Yoon's The Mountain

In Paul Yoon’s second story collection The Mountain, people in France, Russia, the Hudson Valley and beyond cope in the aftermath of World War Two. I opened the book expecting the violence and horror of war, but instead found tender accounts of people humbly piecing their lives together. Yoon’s characters tread gingerly in the aftermath of war, nursing the wounds inflicted upon their environment and their bodies. The power of Yoon’s stories lies in what’s not said. By entering scenes after the climax of battle, Yoon bypasses brutality to arrive at the quietly wrenching. His stories made me ache, like scar tissue after the injury has not quite healed.

The Mountain smacks of Tim O’Brien’s classic The Things They Carried, a collection published in 1990 that explores the grim banality of the lives of soldiers who suffer from PTSD after serving in the Viet Nam war. In the wake of trauma, both O’Brien’s and Yoon’s characters experience a muted, dulled version of the world. In turn, the climaxes these authors construct are so subtle you almost miss them. In O’Brien’s “Speaking of Courage,” for example, protagonist Norman Bowker drives in circles around a pond in his hometown after returning from war, replaying his friend’s death on the battlefield. After eleven cycles around the pond he ultimately gets out of his car and walks into the water. Nothing has been resolved, and Norman is still haunted by his memories, but he has done something. He has stepped out of his cyclical thoughts and activity and, in a way, is baptized. In Yoon’s story “A Willow and the Moon,” a woman returns to the Hudson Valley after working to save patients in a bombed out hospital in England. She goes to the now abandoned sanatorium in which her mother, a nurse, worked and eventually overdosed on morphine. She meanders through the empty hallways, finding trinkets she’s hidden under floorboards decades ago and reflecting on the brutality she witnessed throughout the war. Like Norman, she was forced to watch her mother slip away. Like Norman, she has returned home in search of closure. The story ends with her sitting in a rocking chair in front of the sanatorium, watching the sun go down while palming the items she’s found. These are not tales of complete healing or resolution. O’Brien’s and Yoon’s characters remain broken, but they are able to find small tokens of comfort. For those who have survived trauma, the mere act of collecting oneself and moving forward is a victory.

O’Brien’s collection was instrumental in portraying war as banal. He shed the archetypal trappings of war as triumphant, and the idea of men emerging from war as heroes. Yoon carries on this tradition and takes it a step further. While O’Brien fixates on the objects his characters carry, Yoon writes about a different kind of baggage. Instead of focusing on physical objects such as ammunition and dog-eared photos of girlfriends, Yoon emphasizes how people carry their own bodies through the world after having experienced the trauma of war. For Yoon’s characters, bodies are very much things to be carried. Individuals continue to fight internal battles after the war is over.

In Vladivostok Station, for example, Mischa carries his physical disability, a congenital limp that inhibits his movement. As Mischa walks through his town of Primorski Krai, he stops to look at an island in the distance on which his grandfather, a Korean refugee, worked in a labor camp for six years. Mischa remembers touching his grandfather’s hands and spine, which was contorted from years of labor, and recalls wonders if his own “misshapen bones” are inherited from his grandfather. For Yoon, trauma does not die. It takes up residence in the body, and is then passed down.

But Yoon’s characters persist. Mishca finds a job where his boss allows him to work at his own pace repairing trains. He falls asleep on a train and ends up near the ocean, where his grandfather and other men in the labor camps were taken to bathe. He walks around an adjacent town, which is vibrant and bustling. He stops to call his father to tell him, simply, that he is by the ocean. Mischa has carried this ancestral weight back to its origins. Things do not change for Mischa by the end of the story, but there is a shift. It is possible to carry sorrow while relishing the victory of survival.

Yoon has a knack for condensing a life, with all its pain and grief, into bite size fragments that make the reader double take. His prose is simultaneously cool and distant, while also pinpointing intimate and striking moments. In the title story The Mountain, the protagonist Faye moves from South Korea to Lianyungang for a job in a factory. Although she is only 26, she has endured a great deal:

She watched her father die. She left. She worked in a motel. She picked apples. She lived in barns that had been converted into dorms. She lived for over a decade in a country where she was never sure of the language. She was robbed, beaten, had her shirt torn off, and six times she was pinned to the ground while she frantically searched for her knife.

Here a life has been paired down to a paragraph, with strife and the mundane mixed together. The fact that Faye picked apples takes up as much space as being robbed and beaten. One is not given more emotional weight than another. This is also the nature of war: when violence is everywhere, our ability to gauge the magnitude of events diminishes. Story and sentence structure mimic the moral nihilism of war.

Despite the dissolution of his characters emotional responses, physical markings of trauma still must be carried. When Faye gets punched during a fight at her factory job, her face is bruised. After a few weeks she can’t tell if the pain is dissipating, or if she’s getting used to it. The coin-sized bruise on her cheek never goes away. Again, physical ailments become metaphor for withstanding emotional trauma. Although pain is not felt emotionally, it manifests in the body.

Yoon’s characters experience profound loss that ultimately cannot be reversed or redeemed. The collection’s power, however, is its presentation of people’s raw, banal struggle. The very title of the book infers a trek. A mountain is a towering natural phenomenon that one must labor to conquer. One must force their body upwards. Yoon does not describe the glory of the summit, but the view afforded by the footholds and crags along the way.