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In Death of Persephone, the patriarchal myth of the maiden taken, raped, and made the potent and sexualized queen of the underworld is questioned, altered, flipped. Instead, we have Stephanie, a girl of seven, taken and raised by her Uncle H. who is obsessed by her, tries to control her, to keep her, to have her even as she blooms out from underneath him.
In poems both lyrical and narrative, a woman paints Hecate on a building, a Hyacinth Macaw flies overhead, a detective bumbles from crime to crime. This is a city with a vast underground where bats hang and paperwhites bloom, a city where men still rule.
Who sees what, who will pay, and who will survive in this ancient story altered at the core?
About this Author
Yvonne Blomer is the author of the critically acclaimed poetry collections The Last Show on Earth (Caitlin Press, 2022) and As if a Raven (Palimpsest Press, 2015) as well as the travel memoir Sugar Ride: Cycling from Hanoi to Kuala Lumpur (Palimpsest Press, 2017). She works as an editor, teacher and mentor in poetry and memoir and served as the city of Victoria poet laureate from 2015-2018. In her tenure as poet laureate, she brought poetry and the poets of Victoria to the forefront of city life. Through poetry she worked to raise awareness for the plight of the Pacific Ocean and its ecology, her tenure culminating in the publication of Refugium: Poems for the Pacific (Caitlin Press, 2017) the first in a trilogy of water-based poetry anthologies that was followed with Sweet Water: Poems for the Watershed (Caitlin Press, 2020). As a community-minded poet and mentor, she was the Artistic Director for the weekly Planet Earth Poetry series and edited the anthology Poems for Planet Earth which came out of that series. Yvonne recently edited Hologram: Homage to P.K. Page (Caitlin Press, 2023). She has been longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize and shortlisted for the Montreal Poetry Prize and the Troubadour International Poetry Prize and won the Gwendolyn MacEwen Poetry Prize for Death of Persephone. She has performed at reading series and festivals in cities across the country and has had poems published in Canada, the UK and Japan. Yvonne lives, works and raises her family on the traditional territories of the WSÁNEC (Saanich), Lkwungen (Songhees), Wyomilth (Esquimalt) peoples of the Coast Salish Nation. With Death of Persephone: A Murder, she has turned her critical gaze to women and the women's movement, the male gaze, and the faulty depictions of women in mythology.
Reviews
"Complex, layered, and deeply allusive, Blomer's startling narrative poem combines a reinterpretation of myth with a reimagining of mystery. The reader becomes a flâneuse, bravely walking the language corridors and striding through a gritty, glittery, real and mythic city. A beguiling interweaving of code-switching and genre-shifting, Death of Persephone: A Murder rewrites the myth of what women can become."
--Méira Cook, author of The Full Catastrophe
"Hardboiled detective tropes meet classical myths and free-form poetry. A breathtaking work of imaginative cross-pollination. Post-modern in absolutely the best sense of the word."
--Will Ferguson, Giller Prize-winning author of 419
"In Death of Persephone, Blomer stalks back alleys, asking urgent questions: Why is the violence against women and girls in myth still haunting us today? Blomer is a poet at the height of her powers, her stanzas blooming with paperwhites, blazing with graffiti. And so the reader gets to be the grieving mother, the doomed daughter, and the hell-bent detective, as Blomer walks us out of the old story and into this essential retelling."
--Ariel Gordon, poet and author of Fungal: Foraging in the Urban Forest
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