Novelist and critic Amanda Dennis documents the transformations experienced during the first three months of her daughter’s life, moving between raw postpartum notes and meditations on her encounter with these notes two years later. She draws on phenomenology and Roland Barthes’ ‘lover’s discourse’ as she struggles to capture radically disorienting change, as well as motherhood’s fluidity – and absurdities. Her meditations were drafted first in a foreign language, French, in the hope that the resistance of the foreign might better capture the press of the body in words as it sustains overwhelming change; they were then translated into the English that appears here. The text is accompanied by images from the Bulgarian photographer Ivo Danchev, renowned for capturing the rituals of the kukeri – the costumed figures whose job it is to clear away the ghosts of winter and usher in the new life accompanying spring.

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