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The inventor of the speculum, J. Marion Sims, is celebrated as the "father of modern gynecology," and a memorial at his birthplace honors "his service to suffering women, empress and slave alike." These tributes whitewash the fact that Sims achieved his surgical breakthroughs by experimenting on eleven enslaved African American women. Lent to Sims by their owners, these women were forced to undergo operations without their consent. Today, the names of all but three of these women are lost.
In Mend: Poems, Kwoya Fagin Maples gives voice to the enslaved women named in Sims's autobiography: Anarcha, Betsey, and Lucy. In poems exploring imagined memories and experiences relayed from hospital beds, the speakers challenge Sims's lies, mourn their trampled dignity, name their suffering in spirit, and speak of their bodies as "bruised fruit." At the same time, they are more than his victims, and the poems celebrate their humanity, their feelings, their memories, and their selves. A finalist for the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Donald Hall Prize for Poetry, this debut collection illuminates a complex and disturbing chapter of the African American experience.
In Mend: Poems, Kwoya Fagin Maples gives voice to the enslaved women named in Sims's autobiography: Anarcha, Betsey, and Lucy. In poems exploring imagined memories and experiences relayed from hospital beds, the speakers challenge Sims's lies, mourn their trampled dignity, name their suffering in spirit, and speak of their bodies as "bruised fruit." At the same time, they are more than his victims, and the poems celebrate their humanity, their feelings, their memories, and their selves. A finalist for the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Donald Hall Prize for Poetry, this debut collection illuminates a complex and disturbing chapter of the African American experience.
- GenresPoetry
96 pages, Paperback
First published September 26, 2018
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Displaying 1 - 24 of 24 reviews
January 11, 2019
Most reviews and blurbs of this, Maples's arresting full-length poetry debut, understandably focus on the history it aims to set straight: an obscure 19th C. Alabama physician rose to prominence -- and is still, nearly 200 years later, hailed as a medical luminary -- because he conducted sadistic experimental gynecological surgery on enslaved women without their consent. It is a testament to Maples's considerable gifts that she is able to give voice not only to the women themselves but to the doctor who mistreated them (and who would be all-too-easy to indict via caricature).
What's still more impressive (and less emphasized in reviews and blurbs) is Maples's ability to weave herself -- and her project -- into the storyline. In so doing, she calls to mind novels like Michael Ondaatje's Coming Through Slaughter and Yann Martel's Life of Pi, where the role of the author as researcher, inventor, redactor, is brought to the fore. For the speaker of these poems -- the Poet, who, we must imagine, is someone very like Maples herself -- the implications of such a role are profound, enormous, unsettling. The tools of narrative can wound and disfigure just as easily as the rudimentary tools of a monstrously misguided (and largely self-taught) 19th C. surgeon. Here, in Maples's capable (dexterous... strong... empathetic... loving...) hands they mend (of course).
In suturing these stories together -- Anarcha's and Betsey's and Lucy's; their tormentor's; the Poet's, her mother's and grandmother's, her young daughters' -- Maples invites all of us to further consider how we're bound to this history, this much-needed (if all-too-belated) new vision: "Maybe," she writes in the preface, "reader, with further consideration, you will see how you are connected with this story. Maybe you will honor what you come to know by sharing it." Mend, like all the best and most honorable books, is worthy of your (further) consideration. You will surely find it too good not to share.
What's still more impressive (and less emphasized in reviews and blurbs) is Maples's ability to weave herself -- and her project -- into the storyline. In so doing, she calls to mind novels like Michael Ondaatje's Coming Through Slaughter and Yann Martel's Life of Pi, where the role of the author as researcher, inventor, redactor, is brought to the fore. For the speaker of these poems -- the Poet, who, we must imagine, is someone very like Maples herself -- the implications of such a role are profound, enormous, unsettling. The tools of narrative can wound and disfigure just as easily as the rudimentary tools of a monstrously misguided (and largely self-taught) 19th C. surgeon. Here, in Maples's capable (dexterous... strong... empathetic... loving...) hands they mend (of course).
In suturing these stories together -- Anarcha's and Betsey's and Lucy's; their tormentor's; the Poet's, her mother's and grandmother's, her young daughters' -- Maples invites all of us to further consider how we're bound to this history, this much-needed (if all-too-belated) new vision: "Maybe," she writes in the preface, "reader, with further consideration, you will see how you are connected with this story. Maybe you will honor what you come to know by sharing it." Mend, like all the best and most honorable books, is worthy of your (further) consideration. You will surely find it too good not to share.
December 14, 2018
Read Mend. Read it for the uncanny beauty of the landscape Kwoya Fagin Maples evokes. Read it for the voiceless, sometimes nameless, women she makes so real they seem to be sitting across the table from you. Read it because we are "worth [the] tenderness" that Kwoya Fagin Maples grants on every page.
November 3, 2018
Last night, I attended a reading from a new book of poetry by Birmingham poet, Kwaoya Fagin Maples.
Her book is Mend.
“The Door
a naked
woman
on knees
and hands
in the backyard of things past telling
her odor
closing the space
he taps her inner
thighs
her used
belly
hangs
like a sow’s
then two new
pewter spoons
and she knows
she’s not here
for mending”
To me, it is one of the most important collections of poetry from 2018.
Mend is a collection of persona poems, written in the voices of the eleven enslaved women who were the victims of experimental gynecological surgeries performed by Dr James Marion Sims of Mount Meigs, Alabama from 1845-1849. These surgeries were performed without anesthesia and without the womens’ consent. Sim’s enslaved “subjects” experienced as many as thirty surgeries each, often before a crude theater of other interested men.
Sims has been called the called the father of “Modern Gynecology”. Although his subjects were never healed, he claimed great medical success. His practices live on in women’s heath care today.
For contemporary women, gynecological care continues to be a tortuous experience where we consent to our own discomfort and shame in the name of medical necessity. The history of Sims’ experiments lives on in our loss of control at the hands of our medical practitioners. The trauma of Dr Sims’ “subjects” is passed onto every woman a who seeks mending under gynecological practices that were established in acts of agony and enslavement.
“First, you’d have to consider us women,
realize our hearts beat under the bush.
You’d have to think my heart longed like yours
And that my mind wasn’t mindless…”
Maples courageously crosses the chasms of their pain and gives her characters depth of feeling. She brings her reader into their imaginations, their grief, their anger and their longings. Her poems create a beauty that becomes a testament to their lives. Their voices speak a powerful and troubling truth about the shame of slavery, while filling us with love and compassion for the women who suffered under Sims’ hands.
Through her words, theirs lives and stories are no longer forgotten in history.
As a woman, a mother, a writer of historical poems, and a veteran women’s health care provider, I find it deeply moving.
With grace, humility and authenticity, Kwoya Maples dipped into our hearts, souls and minds last night—breaking them and leaving us with tenderness.
Her book is Mend.
“The Door
a naked
woman
on knees
and hands
in the backyard of things past telling
her odor
closing the space
he taps her inner
thighs
her used
belly
hangs
like a sow’s
then two new
pewter spoons
and she knows
she’s not here
for mending”
To me, it is one of the most important collections of poetry from 2018.
Mend is a collection of persona poems, written in the voices of the eleven enslaved women who were the victims of experimental gynecological surgeries performed by Dr James Marion Sims of Mount Meigs, Alabama from 1845-1849. These surgeries were performed without anesthesia and without the womens’ consent. Sim’s enslaved “subjects” experienced as many as thirty surgeries each, often before a crude theater of other interested men.
Sims has been called the called the father of “Modern Gynecology”. Although his subjects were never healed, he claimed great medical success. His practices live on in women’s heath care today.
For contemporary women, gynecological care continues to be a tortuous experience where we consent to our own discomfort and shame in the name of medical necessity. The history of Sims’ experiments lives on in our loss of control at the hands of our medical practitioners. The trauma of Dr Sims’ “subjects” is passed onto every woman a who seeks mending under gynecological practices that were established in acts of agony and enslavement.
“First, you’d have to consider us women,
realize our hearts beat under the bush.
You’d have to think my heart longed like yours
And that my mind wasn’t mindless…”
Maples courageously crosses the chasms of their pain and gives her characters depth of feeling. She brings her reader into their imaginations, their grief, their anger and their longings. Her poems create a beauty that becomes a testament to their lives. Their voices speak a powerful and troubling truth about the shame of slavery, while filling us with love and compassion for the women who suffered under Sims’ hands.
Through her words, theirs lives and stories are no longer forgotten in history.
As a woman, a mother, a writer of historical poems, and a veteran women’s health care provider, I find it deeply moving.
With grace, humility and authenticity, Kwoya Maples dipped into our hearts, souls and minds last night—breaking them and leaving us with tenderness.
November 26, 2018
Mend is a timely, heart-wrenching book of historical persona poems told mostly through the perspectives of Anarcha, Betsey, and Lucy, slave women who were experimented on by a man now considered to be the father of modern gynecology. Maples tenderly excavates this little-known history with careful research and in the process she attempts to restore the voices of the women who had no choice but to submit to these barbaric practices. Maples also calls on contemporary readers to take this history of gynecology and place it in context with racist medical institutions that still place less value on black women's lives today. Despite the heavy subject matter, Mend is at times very tender and hopeful. Maples's book is ultimately a celebration of black womanhood and motherhood. I can't recommend this book enough.
August 19, 2020
In MEND, Maples imagines the thoughts and inhabits days in the life of Anarcha, Betsey, and Lucy, three enslaved women subjected to the gynecological experimentations of the (in)famous James Marion Sims. In heartbreaking poetic vignettes and opium-addled fugues, Maples conveys the physical pain they endured as Sims conducted multiple fistula surgeries on the women, almost always without anesthesia (until after the conclusion of the procedures). MEND is a quick read, but not an easy one-to do her work, Maples often describes the procedures in graphic, unflinching detail, including the anguish inflicted from the damage done by Sims' improvised instruments. There are the births, or stillbirths, that cause the injury-
Days before the dead fetus came by forceps...Worked into the vagina, the metal shifted for its own comfort...Blood for days...the tears, heavy trauma, as yet unstitched... ("So Familiar He Is with Parting Her Brown Legs")
and there is the smell in the room that typically accompanies the injury. What ensues is shame. As enslaved women, they have no bodily agency-they know nothing about their bodies that this doctor, or whoever Sims might invite to watch his work, don't know:
don't listen to the smell... ("A Thousand Cats")
My behind is high up in the air...I just sit up there on that table and cry. Next thing you know, I'm sittin' there snifflin' and in walks a pack of white men. I jerk up, clawing on the sheet on the table and pullin' down my skirts. The doctor's eyes meet mine, and then he points from my hem to my waist, tells me this is purely scientific. A few men place their hankerchiefs over their noses. "Excuse the odor gentlemen," he says. ("The Doctor Asks If I Want To Go Home The Way I Came").
Occasionally, Maples intersperses the text with other chillingly clinical commentary from Sims, actual quotes such as
"...Death would've been preferable. But patients of this kind never die-they must live and suffer"
and "My patients are all perfectly satisfied with what I am doing for them."
Another poignant, ironic moment comes with Maples' interaction with a librarian in Mt. Meigs, Alabama, where Sims performed the operations. The librarian mentions, without context, that Sims is famous because "he operated on an African-American woman and saved her life!"
By the end of the book, tender reflections on family and pregnancy like "The Poem Resists with Joy" and "My Mother Bathes Me After I Give Birth" make the reader feel Maples is aware of the grim precision with which she has imparted the agony of Sims' subjects. These poems feel like intentional respites from the trauma of the earlier pages; they read like prayers of thanksgiving. In "My Mother Bathes Me...", when the speaker reclines in a bathtub after birth and reflects that she is "...an aching shell...worth tenderness," the implication is clear - Anarcha, Betsey, Lucy, and every enslaved woman was worth that same tenderness.
Days before the dead fetus came by forceps...Worked into the vagina, the metal shifted for its own comfort...Blood for days...the tears, heavy trauma, as yet unstitched... ("So Familiar He Is with Parting Her Brown Legs")
and there is the smell in the room that typically accompanies the injury. What ensues is shame. As enslaved women, they have no bodily agency-they know nothing about their bodies that this doctor, or whoever Sims might invite to watch his work, don't know:
don't listen to the smell... ("A Thousand Cats")
My behind is high up in the air...I just sit up there on that table and cry. Next thing you know, I'm sittin' there snifflin' and in walks a pack of white men. I jerk up, clawing on the sheet on the table and pullin' down my skirts. The doctor's eyes meet mine, and then he points from my hem to my waist, tells me this is purely scientific. A few men place their hankerchiefs over their noses. "Excuse the odor gentlemen," he says. ("The Doctor Asks If I Want To Go Home The Way I Came").
Occasionally, Maples intersperses the text with other chillingly clinical commentary from Sims, actual quotes such as
"...Death would've been preferable. But patients of this kind never die-they must live and suffer"
and "My patients are all perfectly satisfied with what I am doing for them."
Another poignant, ironic moment comes with Maples' interaction with a librarian in Mt. Meigs, Alabama, where Sims performed the operations. The librarian mentions, without context, that Sims is famous because "he operated on an African-American woman and saved her life!"
By the end of the book, tender reflections on family and pregnancy like "The Poem Resists with Joy" and "My Mother Bathes Me After I Give Birth" make the reader feel Maples is aware of the grim precision with which she has imparted the agony of Sims' subjects. These poems feel like intentional respites from the trauma of the earlier pages; they read like prayers of thanksgiving. In "My Mother Bathes Me...", when the speaker reclines in a bathtub after birth and reflects that she is "...an aching shell...worth tenderness," the implication is clear - Anarcha, Betsey, Lucy, and every enslaved woman was worth that same tenderness.
March 18, 2025
MEND is truly haunting--the histories of the women that Maples writes about have been forgotten over time--until she gave us this work that brings their names back to our mouths. Through the pain that these women experience, there is also coping. We always hear about the testing of bodies but never the feelings OF the body, so I appreciated this set of poems. While I have never experienced the same level of pain as Anarcha, Lucy, or Betsy, I can understand to a certain extent (especially having gone through unmedicated pain at a gynecologist). It was never fair for these women to go through what they did. They deserved so much better.
The set of poems given by the author was cleverly written. Having picked apart the meaning of her works was an entertaining exercise for myself. The use of images were fascinating. This published work reclaims the words of women who could not speak for themselves—it’s very common in the medical field. How Maples “mended” the stories of Anarca, Lucy and Betsy together to her own life, her own traumatic experience giving birth—it was very thoughtful, and I felt that it was an effective approach to relating to the women before her, to share their unheard stories.
The set of poems given by the author was cleverly written. Having picked apart the meaning of her works was an entertaining exercise for myself. The use of images were fascinating. This published work reclaims the words of women who could not speak for themselves—it’s very common in the medical field. How Maples “mended” the stories of Anarca, Lucy and Betsy together to her own life, her own traumatic experience giving birth—it was very thoughtful, and I felt that it was an effective approach to relating to the women before her, to share their unheard stories.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
March 17, 2025
Mend is a series of poems that explores the themes of healing and coping through personal experiences and traumatic events. The poems dive deeply into the emotional and physical scars left behind from historical and personal experiences. Focusing on black womanhood, ancestral trauma, and the journey towards healing.
Maples used imagery and raw emotion to describe the process of mending both individually and as a whole group of black women. The collection of these poems speaks to the need of coping with pain and loss as well as the power from remembering and reclaiming their identity. She shows how healing is not linear but more so an ongoing process of confronting trauma, embracing vulnerability, and seeking strength from history and family.
I am unsure of my feelings about this book. I did not love how you had to break down each poem to understand the meaning. At the same time, I also think once you figured out the meaning of each poem the book made complete sense and was a good read. If you like digging to find meaning behind the words this would be a good book for you. I would rate this book “Mend” a three out of five stars.
Maples used imagery and raw emotion to describe the process of mending both individually and as a whole group of black women. The collection of these poems speaks to the need of coping with pain and loss as well as the power from remembering and reclaiming their identity. She shows how healing is not linear but more so an ongoing process of confronting trauma, embracing vulnerability, and seeking strength from history and family.
I am unsure of my feelings about this book. I did not love how you had to break down each poem to understand the meaning. At the same time, I also think once you figured out the meaning of each poem the book made complete sense and was a good read. If you like digging to find meaning behind the words this would be a good book for you. I would rate this book “Mend” a three out of five stars.
March 14, 2025
Maples’s MEND is a disturbingly beautiful collection of poetry that ties together personal experiences with the experiences of others. Overall, the collection of poems focus on themes of trauma, healing, identity, and illness. Each poem provides a huge emotional impact no matter who the reader may be. The style of the writing reads like a mixture of prose and song lyrics with each poem telling a story yet with a deeper emotional meaning. The idea of “mending” from the topics of trauma, healing, identity, and illness are both literal and metaphorical. It served as the strong connection between each poem. “Mending” symbolises more than simply healing and being resilient during the difficult types but also the never ending struggle of finding strength in being vulnerable. This was a difficult yet amazing read, and I would definitely recommend this book to a friend or family member. My rating is 5 out of 5 stars. However, I would be prepared to feel a little uneasy, disturbed, but yet enlightened by the poems of Maples.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
March 16, 2025
MEND by Kwoya Fagin Maples is a poetic book that is historical and exploratory within women and their wounds from the past. It discusses how women are used within experiments by doctors and the effect it leaves on them. The writing, poetically, is difficult to comprehend at times, and one may not truly grasp the meaning of the poems at firsthand. The book has nonlinear structure that mirrors complexity of recovery, making it a deeply introspective read. The author’s writing is both haunting and hopeful, offering a profound exploration of emotional restoration. Self-care, empathy, and endurance are reminded to readers throughout the entirety of the book to show how important they are. Overall, MEND is a moving mediation on the intricate process of healing.
March 17, 2025
I like to start this off with saying I like books that have a lot of history, and I like writing my own poetry, so this book was very interesting to me. Comparing it to the underlying I liked Mend better because I liked analyzing the poems and thinking about what it means, what it connects to in the story, and what the author is trying to tell us. Undying was more of a personal story as Mend is also a personal book, but in very different forms in my opinion.
July 1, 2021
This collection is truly remarkable. Both the individual poems and the construction/ordering of the collection itself require an active presence on the emotional journey Maples has created. The strength and skill of the eleven-sonnet corona "Yield" should be required reading. I will own this and reread it as often as I am emotionally able.
August 6, 2021
These will stick with me. The poems about the women Sims experimented on gives them the depth and humanity that they deserved but weren't given when they needed it most. And that Fagin Maples ends the collection with poems about her grandmother, mother, and daughters that beautifully encapsulate motherhood is perfect and wonderful. This was a very thoughtful and thought-provoking collection.
November 22, 2024
Not an easy read, but a speculative portrait into the lives of slave women who had gynecological experiments performed on them. Poignant, significant, and well researched. Give voice to the voiceless and humanizes, a tender treatment of traumatic and horrific experience and tries to illuminate a grand historical wrong by making a new legacy through personal and maternal lineages
July 3, 2020
I just read this collection in one sitting, and now I’m about to reread it again. I almost cannot articulate the beauty, power, and enlightenment that these poems illustrate. Dive into the narratives of Lucy, Anarcha, and Betsey — and be moved.
December 13, 2018
An exquisite collection of poems that beer through forms and personas to achieve a memorable whole.
September 20, 2019
This book is heartbreaking and also beautiful, painful and also joyful
November 16, 2020
Poems are meant to evoke emotion and that is what these poems do. They evoke horror, revulsion, and anger at a system that allowed medical experimentation on slave women in the early 1800s.
October 19, 2021
Everyone should read this and then give it to a friend to read, too.
October 26, 2021
Phenomenal.
January 20, 2025
3.5 This is a difficult read if you allow yourself to be inhabited by the thoughts of Anarcha, Betsy and Lucy.
July 15, 2025
Wonderful collection centered in historical persona poetry with select poems set in the present.
March 9, 2022
maybe my favorite poetry collection i’ve ever read
December 14, 2018
Stunning and powerful. "Mend" is astonishing and profound, a work of breathtaking strength from an immensely talented writer.
Displaying 1 - 24 of 24 reviews