If There Is a Butterfly That Drinks Tears - Paperback

What does it mean to become a mother in a world that both demands and diminishes that transformation? In her second full-length collection, award-winning Western Australian poet Natalie Damjanovich-Napoleon turns this question over with uncommon tenderness, fury, and wit. If There Is a Butterfly That Drinks Tears moves through the body and beyond it - through pregnancy, birth, breastfeeding, endometriosis, miscarriage, infertility, and the fierce, exhausting love of raising a child - while never losing sight of the political forces that shape all these private experiences.

Formally inventive and emotionally wide-ranging, the collection deploys a remarkable arsenal of poetic modes: erasure poems drawn from What to Expect When You're Expecting, a ghazal, a pantoum, a sestina, prose poems, list poems, haiku, and avant-garde language poetry. Each form is chosen with precision - the erasures performing the very silencing they protest; the traditionally structured forms wrestling personal feeling into societal frame. The collection's centrepiece poem, inspired by a National Geographic account of Julia butterflies that drink the tears of Amazonian turtles, expands from ecological observation into a meditation on borders, loss, and the animal grief of motherhood.

Throughout, Damjanovich-Napoleon weaves the intensely personal with the urgently political: the Sandy Hook shooting lands in the same breath as butterfly kisses; abortion rights and heartbeat laws are held alongside the mess of new parenthood; a history of Western childbirth traces patriarchal medicine from ancient Greece to the present. The voice is at once fierce and vulnerable, funny and harrowing, always clear-eyed.

Born of woman, written for women, and essential reading for anyone who has ever tried to hold the world's complexity inside a single human life - this is a collection that does not flinch.