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Childless Millennial — Chiara Di Lello

$15.00

Childless Millennial is a rallying cry for a label reclaimed with pride. This book is a blueprint-by-amalgamation for what a fulfilling non-reproducing life can be. Drawing inspiration from as disparate sources as her own non-biological mother figures, the act of nurturing of other people's children, and the natural world, Chiara Di Lello's chapbook cuts against the expectation of compulsory motherhood. Through a multi-generational dive into her own Ukrainian immigrant family, she wrestles with the choice to be child-free and its thorny entanglements with gender and culture. Childless Millennial rejects expectations and forges its own answers to what makes a meaningful life.

Chiara Di Lello is a queer writer, artist, and educator who loves coffee and bees and unequivocally supports the movement for Palestinian liberation. Born and raised in New York City, she now resides in the Hudson Valley where she teaches students of many ages in creative and academic settings. Her poems and essays have appeared in Ninth Letter, Catapult, Okay Donkey, and Whale Road Review, and have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Her spare time is spent trying to be a better gardener and spoiling her friends' kids.

Childless Millennial is a rallying cry for a label reclaimed with pride. This book is a blueprint-by-amalgamation for what a fulfilling non-reproducing life can be. Drawing inspiration from as disparate sources as her own non-biological mother figures, the act of nurturing of other people's children, and the natural world, Chiara Di Lello's chapbook cuts against the expectation of compulsory motherhood. Through a multi-generational dive into her own Ukrainian immigrant family, she wrestles with the choice to be child-free and its thorny entanglements with gender and culture. Childless Millennial rejects expectations and forges its own answers to what makes a meaningful life.

Chiara Di Lello is a queer writer, artist, and educator who loves coffee and bees and unequivocally supports the movement for Palestinian liberation. Born and raised in New York City, she now resides in the Hudson Valley where she teaches students of many ages in creative and academic settings. Her poems and essays have appeared in Ninth Letter, Catapult, Okay Donkey, and Whale Road Review, and have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Her spare time is spent trying to be a better gardener and spoiling her friends' kids.

Advance Praise for Childless Millennial

“What does it mean to choose the self despite inheriting generations of self-denial? ‘I am trying to keep myself in the frame,’ Chiara Di Lello asserts in her heartfelt debut chapbook, Childless Millennial, which complicates and enriches the narrative of a ‘nulliparous’ person defined by ‘what I have / chosen not to do.’ Staunchly unpretentious and refreshingly sincere, these poems remain steadfast in their earnestness even as the world ends. ‘It can’t all be calamity,’ Di Lello insists. And her poems make us believe her.”

— Eugenia Leigh, author of Bianca

“‘I am burning / my one-way ticket / to legibility’ writes Chiara Di Lello in this bold and clear-eyed collection. Here, the duties of womanhood—both tacit and implicit—are painstakingly examined as if observed through a jeweler’s loupe. Under Di Lello’s sharp gaze, childhood memories glint and cut like the psychic heirlooms they are. As her speaker comes of age, she swaps one magnifying lens for another, witnessing through figurative binoculars how the natural world can serve as a model for embodied living, for the right to choose the conditions of one’s life. Witty, confrontational, and delightfully candid, Childless Millennial delivers a much-needed modern spin on the Wild Woman archetype, and a daring new voice in poetry.”

— Leslie Sainz, author of Have You Been Long Enough at Table

“Chiara Di Lello’s poems breathe life into this grotesque era of reactionary natalist politics. Mixing different registers and dictions, pulling threads from her Ukrainian-language childhood, Di Lello brews magic in juxtapositions. Pop culture (‘Baby one more time’) limns the self-portrait. Containers for infants and dentures chat across stanzas. The word ‘Nulliparous’ shimmers across various titles, framing alternate contexts for those with wombs that have never had a live birth, regardless of whether they have been pregnant or not. ‘Nulliparous (Definitions)’ is gorgeous, an anthem that deserves to be read by every oviparous mammal weighed down by the cultural expectation of having kids: ‘for what I have / chosen not to do, / the closest word we have slanders me: / not creating, not laboring / having brought nothing into being’. From episiotomies to Susan Stewart’s laughter, the details give us an unforgettable, palpable world, assembled by a poet who knows her material so well that the images hum through your head long after leaving the room of the poem.

— Alina Stefanescu, author of My Heresies