Review:
Mama Amazonica
by Pascale Petit From Planet 229
Sarah Coles reviews
Mama Amazonica
by Pascale Petit
Bloodaxe, £9.95
Pascale Petit’s latest collection, Mama Amazonica, is a lush, horrifying beauty which plunges the reader into a jungle of violence, mental illness and heartbreaking memory. Petit, however, leads us with such masterful elegance that we are compelled to follow. The journey is the poet’s remarkably imaginative response to her mother’s abuse, mental instability and the subsequent attempts to ‘cure’ her using various invasive therapies. The poems vibrate in the liminal plane between stark reality and a surreal, exquisitely rendered dream-space which is at once gorgeous and repulsive – reflecting the tender love and haunted fear which the daughter feels for her mother.
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