In Cancer Courts My Mother, poet LindaAnn LoSchiavo transforms the experience of caregiving, illness, and grief into a daring and deeply metaphorical poetry collection. Known for blending emotional truth with imaginative symbolism, LoSchiavo approaches cancer not through sentimentality or clinical distance, but as a persistent suitor—one that courts, seduces, and ultimately claims. In this interview, she reflects on inspiration, metaphor, craft, and the awards her work has received, offering readers insight into both the creative process and the emotional landscape behind this powerful book.
In our last interview you spoke at length about how seasonal imagery fuels your creativity. How do you now find inspiration outside seasonal or genre-specific motifs?
For “Cancer Courts My Mother” the inspiration was the experience of being a full-time caregiver to my terminally-ill mother.
As someone deeply engaged with craft, what advice would you offer to poets who struggle with shaping personal or challenging content into artistic form?
Read the work of innovative poets in literary magazines that focus on challenging content. Two examples are The Rumpus, where there is a focus on writing about disability, sexual assault, adoption trauma, and mental health, and Muzzle Magazine, where marginalized voices are welcome to share their perspective on difficult subjects.
Which writers or poets have influenced your thinking about metaphor and narrative most profoundly?
Dante, Chaucer, Boccaccio.
How do you maintain creative momentum when you’re working on emotionally charged projects versus conceptual or experimental ones?
Writing energizes me. When in doubt, I will write the messy lines instead of waiting for the perfect stanza. Later, in a cooler frame of mind, I will revise.
Looking forward, are there new themes, forms, or literary traditions you’re excited to explore next?
As you might recall from our discussion last year, my award-winning collection Always Haunted: Hallowe’en Poems [Wild-Ink Publishing, Oct. 2024] explored social justice themes via the seasonal 3-day holiday of Halloweentide. One of my new WIPs, Return of the Werewolf: Poems, uses the iconic figure of this shape-shifting predator to explore difficult topics such as child sex trafficking, domestic violence, prostitution, racial prejudice, abandonment, and the like.
Your previous interview explored Halloween’s influence on your poetry. How did the inspiration for Cancer Courts My Mother first emerge?
What initially led me to pursue a challenging collection on caregiving and cancer was the attention critics bestowed on the six poems about my dying mother in Apprenticed to the Night [UK: UniVerse Press, May 2024]. Certain interviewers claimed these poems, especially “My Mother’s Ghost Dancing,” had helped them cope with their own loss and grief. Since these six were already created as poems, it made sense to explore further with poetry.
The title of this book is striking and metaphorical. Can you share how you chose it and what it signifies for you as a collection?
Poetry collections about a terminal illness will typically follow one of two predictable paths: the purely clinical or the overtly sentimental. Cancer Courts My Mother avoids both of these by offering a layered poetic chronicle of what it means to care for a mother when the past has not been gentle—and it defies expectations further by treating the patient’s decline as a story of adultery.
In your earlier work, you often used folklore, symbolism, and narrative elements. How do those elements appear or shift in this new book?
In order to give a collection about my dying mother some sunlight, I included an enduring symbol of uplift: greenery. After all, every garden is where death meets optimism. My narrative arc is a funicular movement: as the mother “wilts,” her neglected garden recovers. Cancer as the persistent suitor who courts my mother, determined to steal her from her family, is an extended metaphor. Another metaphor is the amaryllis, “force which sleeps but cannot die,” according this bulb a spiritual weight.
Were there particular literary or symbolic traditions that shaped the metaphors you use in this collection?
Although I eschew the elegiac in this collection, John Milton’s Lycidas, a lamentation on the death of a young friend, was an inspiration.
Are there specific poems in this collection that challenged you the most to write either technically or emotionally?
“Mother Magnified” and “Flash” were emotionally difficult but too honest to ignore.
How did you approach organizing the poems into a cohesive arc—what guided the sequence or voice across the book?
My narrative arc is a funicular movement: as the mother “wilts,” her neglected garden recovers. The sub-plot—rescuing the plants—kept the mood from descending into despair. Around the midpoint, two flashback poems focus on my mother’s remission interval. With the exception of this flashback, the poems are organized chronologically.
“Cancer Courts My Mother” has won two awards: The BREW Seal of Excellence Award—from The Chrysalis BREW Project—and Voyages of Verses Book Award—from One Tribune. Could you tell us how you feel about it?
Recognition and awards are impactful because they convey appreciation, encouragement, and make an author feel “seen.” In the same way that effusive praise from strangers over six poems in Apprenticed to the Night propelled me into the W.I.P. that became Cancer Courts My Mother, these acknowledgments have served as crucial affirmations that my work mattered to others—beyond my own need to write it. To me, honors are less about validation of talent and more about connection—confirmation that the private emotions I have grappled with have resonated with readers and touched something universal in the particular. Each recognition has felt like permission to go deeper, to take greater risks in my work.
What do you hope Cancer Courts My Mother invites readers to think or feel about illness, resilience, or human relationships in metaphorical terms?
“Cancer Courts My Mother” invites readers to consider how we maintain connection with those we love even as illness transforms them—and after they're gone. The collection explores resilience not as defiance of death, but as an openness to continuing bonds that transcend physical presence.
For example, in my sonnet “An Early Visit from the Grim Reaper,” a visitation from my late Uncle Larry prompts me to check on my mother, who had yanked out her oxygen tubes, resulting in my chance to rescue her by reconnecting her medical equipment. Whether we understand such experiences as spiritual communication, intuitive knowing, or the mysterious workings of grief and memory, they reveal something profound about human connection. These moments suggest that love creates pathways between people that illness and death cannot fully sever.
Personally, I don't see dying as an ending but as a transition. The relationships that matter most to us continue to evolve, speaking to us through dreams, sudden thoughts, or unexpected moments of clarity. By remaining open to these forms of connection—call it telepathy, intuition, or simply the enduring presence of love—we soften bereavement's sharpest edges.
Ultimately, I hope the collection encourages readers to trust their own experiences of ongoing connection with those they've lost, and to recognize that staying in conversation with our loved ones, in whatever form that takes, is part of what makes us resilient in the face of loss.
With Cancer Courts My Mother, LindaAnn LoSchiavo offers readers a poetry collection that is unflinching, imaginative, and deeply human. Through metaphor and narrative, she invites us to reconsider illness, love, and the bonds that endure beyond death. If this interview resonated with you, we’d love to hear your thoughts—what line, image, or poem stayed with you the longest?
Comments
Post a Comment