Adrienne Gruber's third full poetry collection, Q & A, is a poetic memoir detailing a first pregnancy, birth and early postpartum period. The poet is both traumatized and transformed by the birth of her daughter. She is compelled by the dark places birth takes her and as she examines and revisits those places, a grotesque history of the treatment of pregnant and birthing women reveals itself.

Adrienne Gruber is the author of the poetry collection This Is The Nightmare (2008; shortlisted for the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry) and three chapbooks: Intertidal Zones (2014), Mimic (2012; winner of a bpNichol Chapbook Award), and Everything Water (2011). Her work has appeared in numerous literary magazines, including Grain, Event, Arc Poetry Magazine, Poetry is Dead, and Plentitude. She has been a finalist for the CBC Literary Awards in poetry, Descant's Winston Collins Best Canadian Poem Contest, and twice for Arc's Poem of the Year Contest. Her poem "Gestational Trail" was awarded first prize in The Antigonish Review's Great Blue Heron Poetry Contest in 2015. Gruber lives in Vancouver with her partner Dennis and their two daughters. Her new book Buoyancy Control is forthcoming from BookThug in the spring of 2016. Learn more at http://adriennegruber.wordpress.com.

Adrienne Gruber's profile page

“Q & A is a fascinating collection of poems because it pulls back the veil on things that haven’t often been spoken about when it comes to the bodily journeys that women undertake during their lifetimes… These are poems that don’t shirk from the gruesome physicality of birthing, but there is beauty here, too, in the poet’s love for her daughter, and in the recognition that there are many sides to the prism of a woman’s life.” —periodicities

“Q & A traverses fraught terrain only to end up, on its final page, with a resolution that feels potent and – not unimportantly – earned. These are poems that confront their subject matter directly and with scant regard for a reader’s refined sensibilities… What [Gruber] offers us is nothing less than the stuff of life itself.” —Quill & Quire

“This collection is simultaneously a poetic memoir, a love letter (“or a poem of grief”) from mother to daughter, and a birthbook, recording conception, gestation, birth, and some of the postpartum period.” —The Maynard

“The poems in Q & A exist precisely within that intimate space, intricately observed, questioned and explored... but Gruber pulls apart through a different lens, articulating short narratives that focus on moments both large and small through an urgency, anxiety and the discovery that letting go is as important as holding close.” —rob mclennan