Monuments and Moral Memory: Contemporary Black Women’s Experimental Poetics of Reproductive Justice

ABSTRACT: This article examines three contemporary poetry collections by Black women that center as their shared, vital topic the enslaved subjects of J. Marion Sims’s unethical nineteenth-century gynecological experiments: Dominique Christina’s Anarcha Speaks: A History in Poems (2018), Kwoya Fagin Maples’s Mend (2018), and Bettina Judd’s patient.: poems (2014). All three texts inhabit these historical figures through persona and deploy extremely formal experimental syntax and grammar. Drawing on Black feminist thinking about critical fabulation, historical revision, and poetics, this article argues that these works are effective, moral counter-monuments to these women not just in content but in formal architecture—because these poets use formal innovation to critique the biased, hegemonic institutions of medicine and history-writing and to urge readers to fight for reparative and reproductive justice.