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Artist Statement about Cancer Courts My Mother

«… every poem breaks a silence that had to be overcome …» 
  — Adrienne Rich

Perhaps because I grew up in a Roman Catholic family, I am drawn to acrostics (crosses) and the punitive syllable counting (the rosary) required by formal verse.  I often employ traditional forms that harness language and shape unruly thoughts.  I use rhyme — both internal and end line — conceding to a self-conscious artifice that rearranges the unfamiliar into something less formidable, i.e., personifying Cancer as my mother’s devoted and determined suitor.
 
Everything has a border, the edge where light cannot get in.  In this poetry collection, I’ve tried to illuminate the difficult daily rituals of taking care of a patient who will neither show improvement nor recuperate.  

Sample Poem

Remembering Remission Christmas

They’d bickered over her like two suitors:
Vitality, her birthright, who had known
My mother well before her married life,
And Cancer, who’d mapped out his own terrain,
Unravelled secret strands of resistance,
Until oncologists chased him away.
Remission Christmas reunited us,
Our joy like steam escaping after frost.
I shipped my gifts to Florida ahead:
Biscotti, pignola cookies, torrone
From Little Italy, fine leather goods,
And for her green thumb, a red amaryllis.   
But Safety Harbor's Gulf of Mexico, 
Producing Christmastime's Cancerian 
Heat in December, had confused this bulb. 
Amidst the presents and nativity,
Its empty cradle strewn with straw, green life 
Ripped up gay mummy wrapping, and tore loose,
Unhampered by its ground like Lazarus 
Unbound. My parents, unprepared for ghosts 
Of miracles, became unnerved by sounds 
Newborn right by their crèche, the fir tree's base,
Invisible and inexplicable
Like faith. Or like remission. After Mass, 
They found a determined amaryllis, force
Which sleeps but cannot die, that mother took to heart.  

Interview

Nigel Kent interviewed poet LindaAnn LoSchiavo.  Here is a brief excerpt.

Nigel Kent:  This week we’re returning to the States to meet poet, LindaAnn LoSchiavo, as she reflects on a poem from her collection, «My Mother’s Ghost Dancing. «

LindaAnn LoSchiavo:  Though authors are often on a journey toward an understanding of the self, their roots, and the past, writing about my difficult parents has always been a struggle. I had to find a strategy.

By choosing to frame my relationship with my mother during the interval of her late-stage cancer when I was her sole caretaker (in my parents’ home in the Sun Belt), the potency of her past abuse could be diluted. Moreover, since my ghostly guardians followed me to Florida, I had an inkling there would be supernatural surprises in store. And there were.  [Sorry, no spoilers. Read about it in the book.]

Her funeral was held in the living room. Then the morgue promptly removed her body.

After being bed-ridden for months, my mother’s ghost cheerfully reclaimed her home. It was thrilling to feel her spirit moving energetically from room to room, delighted to be free of illness, and telepathing her joy to me. This supernatural experience informed «My Mother’s Ghost Dancing. «

This poem came in as a contest finalist and has also been the focus of a few readings I’ve done. Having created such a stir, subsequently it inspired me to write similar poems during this spring.

Eventually, two dozen poems (or so) became a chapbook «Cancer Courts My Mother.» …   

Please follow this link for the rest of the interview.
https://nigelkentpoet.wordpress.com/2023/09/23/drop-in-by-lindaann-loschiavo/  

Book Description

Defying Expectations, a Caregiver’s Journey Is Told as a Story of Adultery
In Cancer Courts My Mother by LindaAnn LoSchiavo, disease becomes a Casanova

Mistrustful of the poetics of dying and bereavement, and determined to avoid cliché, LindaAnn LoSchiavo has alighted on a form which eschews the elegiac in favor of a two-way narrative arc structured like a funicular. 

The downward movement, a terminally ill patient’s inevitable decline, is presented as marital peril:  a dangerous dalliance.  Disease is disguised as an illicit lover ―“the dark prince whose wanton seduction has already begun, the sly suitor who will reach the terminus.”

In contrast, the ascending movement is hopeful, told through the sub-plot of fulfilling a last request: “Work miracles,” commanded half-shut eyes.By carefully reversing little green deaths, the poems transform a wish into reality: a full recovery of the dying woman’s cherished houseplants.

Matt Potter, Editor-in-Chief of Pure Slush Publishing, offered this praise:  Real and harried, purposeful and comprehensive, when understanding is sought and reason is not always kind, «Cancer Courts My Mother» provides readers with great measures of meaning. 

Some poems in this poignant collection have won individual prizes and were seen in literary journals in five countries, Australia, Canada, England, Hungary, and the United States.   

Purchase Link
Kindle and Paperback

LindaAnn LoSchiavo’s Biography

Native New Yorker and award-winner, LindaAnn LoSchiavo is a member of British Fantasy Society, Horror Writers Association, Science Fiction Poetry Association, and The Dramatists Guild.

Her craft essays have appeared in Writer’s Digest, Authors Publish Magazine, Beyond Craft, Behind the Pages, Roi Fainéant, Review Tales, etc. 

Between 2018 – 2025, she has had nine chapbooks and two full-length collections released by various presses in the USA, the UK, and India.

Book Accolades: Elgin Award for “A Route Obscure and Lonely”; Chrysalis BREW Project’s Award for Excellence and The World’s Best Magazine’s Book of Excellence Award for “Always Haunted: Hallowe’en Poems”; and the Spotlyts Story Award from Spotlyts Magazine for «Apprenticed to the Night.»

Additionally, “Always Haunted: Hallowe’en Poems” achieved recognition as a 3rd Place Finalist in Chrysalis BREW Project’s Readers’ Choice Awards, 2024 – 2025.