reviewed on October 21, 2026

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For more or less obvious reasons—nepotism, aesthetic subjectivity, demographics—literary prizes rarely go to the “best” book in a given year.  Art is not a contest.

 

To have found its way onto this year’s long-lists, however—recognition which the book deserves—The Decadent Movement would have had to overcome the recent disregard of prize committees for work that centers on what one might generalize as “domestic experience,” including motherhood.  I am willing to be proven wrong, but the titles of Pulitzer finalists from the last five years suggest the more epic predilections of such committees: A Treatise on Stars, In the Lateness of the World, Information Desk: An Epic, Ars Poeticas, The Intentions of Thunder.  To a certain extent—and with some exceptions, including Tripas and Becoming Ghost—finalists seem to have had to justify their selection with the grandeur of their subject matter.

 

It would be a mistake, though, to think of The Decadent Movement and many other examinations of motherhood as merely “domestic.”  Alongside Glück’s Firstborn, Graham’s PLACE,  and much of Eavan Boland's work, the book studies motherhood as, on one hand, an intimate psychological transformation and, on the other hand, access to a kind of cosmic negative sublime.  In regard to the latter, Kolbe wonders in “Minus Time” “[w]hy we do not abhor our pre-life, // as infinitely long and thoughtless as our death—maybe it is / our death, mirrored: not mystic but math, my mind // likely as absent in 1789 as 2089.”  Kolbe is even more riveting on the former, conducting a stunning interior investigation on what motherhood does to one’s identity as both an artistic and sexual being.  In “Three and a Dog,” she writes of her partner that “[w]e bicker on this point and swindle / More from each other, expansive minutes that could / Have bought another line in A.’s novel // Or in this poem.”  “I remember,” Kolbe picks up later, “when // I read and wrote all day on the Craigslist table.”

 

An M.D. who teaches and researches medical ethics at Weill Cornell Medical Center in New York, Kolbe recounts across The Decadent Movement her pregnancy and first year of her child’s life, in reverse chronological order.  Neither sensational nor sentimental, the book folds into the poems themselves the latent potential for maudlin “my-child-is-special” schmaltz.  Which is to say—part of what I love about this book is its ambivalence, how Kolbe treats motherhood not as a mystical calling, much less as some rebarbative natalist “trad life,” but as a vexing and not necessarily virtuous sacrifice of self, or of the self one used to be.  “I’d once loved din, disorder,” she writes in the first poem in the book, “Afterword”:

 

                                                           all the box

            Pandora’s minders say we must lament.

 

            I worried being smoothed down till I couldn’t

            know myself.  That those lead aprons—pregnant,

 

            parent—would halt the rays of light

            and danger that pierced me to the bone,

 

            frizzed my genes in ways I’d come

            to love, a life distressed and broken-in

 

            and uncomfortably unkempt.

 

To be a mother, Kolbe suggests, is to forego the wild nights of one’s youth, the “wolfishness,” as she puts it later, that once characterized even one’s own marriage.  As here, Kolbe is incredibly wise on the effects of motherhood on a domestic and sexual partnership.  In “Film Maudit,” that interior perceptiveness informs a brilliant meditation on love as debt and obligation:

 

            Your kind might be something more

            Shorn, less shine, more free.

            Not that you would do anything

 

            But stay.  This marks the difference, though­—

            Your good will and its long and notional leash—

            My needle through the eye

 

            Of the sequin of me.  My shining

            With adherence.  There are how many

            Kinds of necessity, and how do we know

 

            We attach to what we love exactly right?

One gets a sense in these passages of the analytical restlessness of The Decadent Movement, of an almost Joycean mulling-over to oneself.  “[D]id I | yes / samples in envelopes,” she writes in “First Cut,” about mailing locks of her child’s hair.  “([A]nd to | his grandmothers don’t / have the same sweet / teeth for locks // but mail has many converts, see / Titus, Romans, Timothy / ).” 

 

This is the epiphanic allusiveness of Joyce, but The Decadent Movement wears beautifully too its indebtedness both to Dickinson and Shakespeare: the strangeness of its locution, the sudden savageries of emotion.  "At scene’s end / I was split,” she writes about a female magician’s assistant in the notorious box-and-saw trick.  “—Not with mirrors / And trickster hidden chambers / But in truth and no soul // Left behind. […] Now my pith is out and not my own.” 

 

The pleasure of this collection, in other words, lies as much in the tactility of its language, its muscularity, as in its fresh take on familiar if under-appreciated subject matter.  “I talk sometimes to Wallace Stevens,” Kolbe writes, and that conversation shows in her Stevensonian penchant for the strange, scalpel-like adjective: “I’ve nothing / to contribute but / my matterhorn subject,” she writes in a poem, in fact, about the NBA playoffs, “my every last / and red ascent.”

 

Decadent in acoustics, refined in argumentation, Kolbe’s second book merits serious consideration for the year’s biggest prizes and fellowships.  It is a book that excites me about what poetry can achieve and where the art is going, and it is a book that treats motherhood, along with its attendant ambivalences, with the massiveness and multidimensionality that the experience deserves.