Condition

By: Meg Reynolds

Published by Inlandia Institute, 2026-04

Condition is a vivid account of early motherhood during the isolation and global intensity of the COVID pandemic. Reynolds witnesses the impossible transformations of her home, her child, and herself while reckoning with a past that overlays the act of parenting. The book is a record of an awe both astonishing and terrible in a rare language rich with metaphor and depth of insight. "To become a parent and to write this book, I had to use every tool and skill at my disposal and had to invent new ones at the moment they were needed. I drew, wrote, slept, ate, fed, found and refound a thousand toys and small items of clothing, brushed hair, had my hair torn out, largely alone. What no one witnessed, I witnessed for myself on the page." For Reynolds, motherhood is a strange landscape of ghosts, monsters, illness, longing, and surprise. It is a wilderness where she and her family must navigate under the strange constraints of the pandemic within the walls of their small apartment and the empty neighborhood. In the absence of others, parenting is an invention and the self is an ever-changing reality. Between the poems, poetry comics, hybrid illustration, and drawn collages, Condition is a powerful collection of work that attests to hard work of love and artmaking.