Carter is currently employed as a freelance writer. In this essay, Carter examines the role of both flesh and feminism plays in shaping the poet's work.

Swir's "Maternity" is part of a poetry collection that mirrors the poet's feminist leanings and her attempts to come to terms with eroticism. Critic and poet Czeslaw Milosz, in the introduction to Talking to My Body, writes of the central theme of Swir's poetry: flesh. Milosz describes her work as an expression of the flesh, "flesh in love—ecstasy, flesh in terror, flesh afraid of loneliness, exuberant, running, lazy, flesh of a woman giving birth, resting . . . feeling the flow of time or reducing time to one instant." Maternity relies on this theme, working as one of the many of the poetic snapshots of Swir's that delve into the human condition, that of the flesh.

Characteristic of Swir's poetry is a marked...