"Birth: A Literary Companion collects the poems, stories, and essays of fifty accomplished writers to guide new parents through the complex emotional terrain of pregnancy, labor, birth, and parenthood. Birth covers the huge emotional spectrum that new parents pass through - from fear and loathing to uncontainable joy. Embracing all kinds of parents - gay and straight, mothers and fathers, married and single, adoptive and biological - the book unlocks, through literature, the secrets of parenthood that science and society rarely reveal."--BOOK JACKET.