the polyphony

Listening to the Silence: On Reading Blu’s Hanging During a Pandemic

Reading Lois-Ann Yamanaka's novel Blu’s Hanging during lockdown, Julia Brown considers the significance of silence during a pandemic.

Incubator imaginaries

For Anne Whitehead, the NICU incubator raises questions of precarity and resilience, and illuminates care as a layered series of interactions involving human and non-human agency.

Heart Excavations

Artist Sofie Layton works with medical data to give physical form to personal narratives of maternal loss and bereavement. This post describes the process of creating Excavations, a performative work that explores a mother’s grief at having lost a young child to cancer.

Creating bonds with a baby expected to die at birth

This personal essay by Tamarin Norwood charts the months of late pregnancy following a terminal prenatal diagnosis, when an unexplained congenital condition led to oligohydramnios: the depletion of amniotic fluid necessary for foetal lung development.