On the Subject of Blackberries

On the Subject of Blackberries

Welcome to the garden. Here we poison our fruits, pierce ourselves with thorns, and transform under the light of the full moon. Mad and unhinged, we fall through rabbit holes, walk willingly into fairy rings, and dance in the song of witchcraft, two snakes around our ankles, the juice of berries on our tongues. Inspired by Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, these poems are meditations on female rage, postpartum depression, compulsion, and intrusive thoughts. They pull from periods of sleep deprivation, soul exhaustion, and nightmarish delusions, and each is left untitled, a nod to the stream-of-conscious mind of a new mother. Using found poetry and under the influence of bibliomancy, Wytovich harnesses the occult power of her imagery and words and aligns it with a new, more vulnerable, darkness. These pieces are not only visions of the madwoman in the attic, but ghostly visitations that explore the raw mental torture women sometimes experience after giving birth. This collection heals as much as it scars, and is an honest look at how trauma seeps into the soil of our bodies. Her poems are imagined horrors, fictional fears, and all the unspoken murmurs of a mind lost between reality and dream. What she leaves in her wake is nothing short of horror—the children lost, the garden dead, the women feral, ready to pounce.
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Reviews

Photo of Seher Mohsin
Seher Mohsin@bookstagramofmine
3 stars
Sep 1, 2023

Thank you NetGalley and Raw Dog Screaming Press for the chance to read and review this book.

Stephanie M. Wytovich is a good writer. I absolutely loved the way she introduced this collection. It's also really made me want to read 'We Have Always Lived in the Castle' which I haven't wanted to do so in the past.

However, maybe it's the fact that I haven't read any Shirley Jackson or maybe I'm not too into horror poetry (I haven't decided yet) I wasn't really enthralled by her poetry.

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