Laura Kolbe

Laura Kolbe is a physician, medical ethicist, and writer. Her poems have appeared in the Best American Poetry series and in American Poetry Review, Conjunctions, Harper’s, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Poetry, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. Her first collection, Little Pharma, won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize and was published by the University of Pittsburgh in 2021. Her chapbook Keeping House: Six Longer Love Poems was selected by Kwame Dawes as the Center for Book Arts annual chapbook contest winner and published in 2025. She teaches and practices medicine in New York City.

The Decadent Movement

Poems

By Laura Kolbe

The Decadent Movement is a book-length suite of poems that spins backward in time through the early days of parenthood and the preceding nine months of pregnancy. Beginning a year after childbirth in the harried throes of marriage and parenting, the collection proceeds toward its finale “Minus Time,” which marvels at death’s near-identical twin – that infinite period of nonexistence that precedes each new life. From the opening poem “Afterword,” each dated poem slides backward in time, with the poem “Hinge” at the manuscript’s midpoint spoken from the moment of childbirth.

This unraveling of a predicament by playing it in reverse – “Muybridged / out so anyone could see, framed, a woman / running for her life” – allows for rigorously honest accounting of mixed feelings about motherhood and its accompanying physical and psychic changes, detached from the readymade tropes of the “pregnancy plot.”

The Decadent Movement is a book about the fear of loss (of sexual personhood, bodily self-determination, the ability to write, and the license to be headlong and volatile). Yet it is also about the need to insist on new terms of engagement with those we love, new languages of willfulness and desire.

Little Pharma

Poems

By Laura Kolbe

The title Little Pharma is both a doppelgänger and a cri de coeur: as the poet’s dreamlike double, the character Little Pharma navigates the murky channels of the hospital and clinic, the borderlands of the living and the dead, and the journey from novice to healer. At the same time, the poems plead for a return to a littler pharma, a space for stolen intimacy and momentary quiet amid the impersonal and engulfing chill that floods the anatomical theater and the corridors of illness. Little Pharma is a Dantean journey from the depths of an institution, and of a pervading personal dread, to a renewed celebration of human contact, the body, and the giddy, terrifying excitement of ongoing life.

Excerpt from “Intensive Care”

Doctor, I don my day-face

like a net of cathodes, drained
of all irruption, non-particular.

Whose mask and sign
is Sun. Enter this sickroom

bugged with surging pentecosts of light,
the green tracings

of the representative heart.
Permit now its miraculous whim.