Review by Mindy Kronenberg
Chiara DiLello’s eloquent and determined debut collection has much to say about the personal and cultural complexities of being a contemporary woman without children. It also summoned a memory from my early writing years. In 1984, I was interviewed with a friend and writing colleague when we coedited an anthology of women’s poetry and prose, Island Women, published with a grant from the American Association of University Women. We were excited for the publicity this could bring to the book, which was a project of the Women Writers Alliance, a local group of female creatives of various genres. Our interviewer, a woman who wrote for a local paper, took copious notes and promised to capture the personal energy and literary spirit of our collection. Her article flattered our long-awaited tome, but she curiously identified each of us by including the word “childless.” It was not exactly something that we dwelled upon in our conversation, just as we hadn’t paid much attention to her mentioning she had five children of her own.
Women can fall prey to societal expectations of institutions like marriage and motherhood, either in their own life path or on behalf of other women. These expectations linger even as women have found lives beyond the homestead and outside the nuclear family, and seek, search for, and secure their core selves. And it is a robust literary legacy that Di Lello follows, including Dickinson, Wharton, Woolf, Atwood, and Peacock.
The poems in Childless Millennial deftly examine the nature of maternity and being maternal as expressed in several guises and relationships. There are several biting and touching poetic meditations on the word “Nulliparous,” the term for a woman who has not given birth to a child. Di Lello cautions against the clinical definition, which emphasizes a lack of physical productivity. From “Nulliparous (Definitions),” p. 10:
There is no word
for what I am,
so I have taken
what I could find
The closest word we have
slanders me:
not creating, not laboring
having brought nothing into being
The preservation of a woman’s identity in a lifetime of coming of age, partnering, motherhood, or living outside cultural dictates is viewed through familiar social media rituals, where the self inadvertently becomes diminished with each rite of passage. In “Nulliparous (PFP),” p. 24, we witness profile pictures typically evolve to wife, then mother and child, and then just child/children, and the poet remarks:
…As if no one but me will wonder
where did she go?
I change my profile picture from one of myself
to one of myself
The answer to your question is literal sometimes:
I am trying to keep myself in the frame.
There are touching and poignant realizations about how one can absorb/be absorbed by those we care about and love, those who give us sight and insight. Di Lello brings her maternal elders and sibling into the larger narrative of becoming oneself, gives homage to her mother’s dedication and guidance in paying attention and inspiring others, summoned here from being on a field trip with her students in “Cardinal, Grackle, Briefly Grapefruit,” p.28:
//…people have asked me how I learned to notice things—
cardinal. grackle. the sky gone briefly grapefruit.
it’s a quality I don’t always notice
that I have, but when someone first asked
I didn’t have to think about it:
I knew I learned it from you.
look at the moon, you say. look at that bird.
everyone needs someone to say look at that bird.
In “Daria,” p.25, the poet speaks to her sister about the natural tie they have to each other, the impact of their first encounter:
You were the first baby I ever held,
my third summer on this planet.
Don’t worry, I’m not reading anything into it;
If anything, I bet it’s thanks to you I’m always hoping
my friends will pause with outstretched arms and say
hey—want to hold the baby?
Di Lello shows us that there’s more than one way to leave a legacy, embracing the world in teachable moments and reinforcing fulfillment through our connection to others and in observing nature. In “Nulliparous (I Respectfully Submit That),” p. 30, she concludes: “A body can make things other than more bodies./ A game, a noise, a small commotion, a great joy.”
Childless Millennial by Chiara Di Lello
Game Over Books 2026
979–8–992455–09–0
Mindy Kronenberg is an award-winning poet and writer with numerous publication credits world-wide. She teaches writing, literature, and arts subjects at SUNY Empire State University, is the editor of Oberon poetry magazine, and the author of Dismantling the Playground (Birnham Wood), Images of America: Miller Place (Arcadia), and OPEN, an illustrated poetry book (Clare Songbirds Publishers).