Published by Finishing Line Press in July, 2012
40 Weeks chronicles the experience of pregnancy, from week 4 to week 40, in short poems that use imagery of the natural world to elucidate the transformation of both mother and child.
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Praise for 40 Weeks
“Rarely do I read a book of poems in one sitting, but from the very first lines of this beautiful new sequence by Brittney Corrigan, my heart kept singing, ‘Yes, yes,’ and I was hooked. Never have I seen the wonder and joy, the ‘unbelievable/disbelief,’ of pregnancy described with such informed tenderness. Nor have I seen a more perfect suiting of form to content: tight, lyrical, sonorous couplets that balance and intertwine, with dazzling imagery, the physical growth as well as the growing cognition – week by week – of both fetus and mother. ‘You tip/the scales of my heart,’ Corrigan says to her unborn child, as she moves closer to giving birth. Reader, these poems will tip yours.”
– Ingrid Wendt
“In 40 Weeks, Corrigan steeps the reader in a fresh cosmology of wonder. Through a bright, clarifying lens of witness and image, these poems sing the startling secrets of invention onto the page, into the body, into the world. I felt inhabited by these poems, returned to that fierce absolute of maternal welcome, cocooned in the tidal and timeless mystery of mingling, then dividing. I wish I’d had this collection of poems to initiate me into my own, 40-week transformation.”
– Sage Cohen
