In Vitro On Longing and Transformation

A meditation on in vitro fertilization that expands and complicates the stories we tell about pregnancy.

Medical interventions become an exercise in patience, desire, and delirium in this intimate account of bodily transformation and disruption. In candid, graceful prose, Isabel Zapata gives voice to the strangeness and complexities of conception and motherhood that are rarely discussed publicly. Zapata frankly addresses the misogyny she experienced during fertility treatments, explores the force of grief in imagining possible futures, and confronts the societal expectations around maternity. In the tradition of Rivka Galchen’s Little Labors and Sarah Manguso’s Ongoingness, In Vitro draws from diary and essay forms to create a new kind of literary companion and open up space for nuanced conversations about pregnancy.

Isabel Zapata is a Mexico City–born writer and editor. She is the author of the poetry book Una ballena es un país and the bilingual essay collection Alberca vacía / Empty Pool (trans. Robin Myers). Recent work has appeared in English translation in World Literature Today, Waxwing, The Common, and Words Without Borders. She is a cofounder and publisher at Ediciones Antílope.

Robin Myers is a Mexico City–based poet and translator. Her translations include Copy by Dolores Dorantes (Wave Books), The Dream of Every Cell by Maricela Guerrero (Cardboard House Press), The Book of Explanations by Tedi López Mills (Deep Vellum Publishing), Cars on Fire by Mónica Ramón Ríos (Open Letter Books), and The Restless Dead by Cristina Rivera Garza (Vanderbilt University Press).