Ivy Alvarez

These poems intertwine the matrilineal experience of breast cancer (which does often run in families) with the Demeter/Persephone story, here reconfigured as "Dee" and "Seph." The book ends up not being "about" breast cancer so much as it is an exploration of the mother/daughter bond and what is passed from one generation to the next, which is sometimes dark and bloody and painful. From “touch”:

my mother’s mother
my mother’s sister
knew its touch
my father’s father
my father’s brother
smelt its breath

breast to breast
it leapt, like lightning
from inner gnawing to outer eye
all along our blood’s line

forking like a fault line
across concrete foundations;
every window in the house
cracks wide

Going through chemo must be kind of like going down to the underworld and hoping that eventually you'll be permitted to emerge again. Mortal doesn’t follow either the cancer narrative or the Persephone/Demeter story in a straight line; rather, the poems pick up bits and pieces of the stories, weaving them together and picking them apart. Despite the simplicity of the language and structure of these poems, it's a complex book, and one I expect I will return to.

(published in Galatea Resurrects 5)… (lisätietoja)