Review by A. Anupama
In this collection, Catherine Esposito Prescott’s poems trace the loss of her teenage son Austen to a rare, pediatric brain cancer. I read this collection in the time between Mother’s Day and my daughter’s high school graduation—already an emotional time, and that’s how it is with poetry books. They often seem to land with synchronicity on a reader, and to grow roots when finding resonance. The sharpness of Prescott’s descriptions of her experience of her son’s illness struck me even more keenly than if I had been in a different part of my life.
Her poem “Meditation on Worry” (p. 18) illuminates the discordance of her experience and the disease itself:
What petty tyrant lives in the skull’s
black box, what erratic wavelengths
does it send, knife-sharpened, vertiginous,
spinning the mind, sowing rows
of discord, a ferocious music? There’s plenty
for everyone in this wilderness,
in the squall of information—from quip
to CT scan, from sneeze to snore.
I’d rather sleep on a plethora of thorns,
on a bed that gives no rest than cancel
joy, even in the middle of doubt,
even if fear lances every thought,
. . .
The poetic process in this poem—of giving shape as a sonnet—mirrors the need of shaping the complexity swirling through the days that come when caring for one’s child through illness. This poem also reflects what I found in the collection as a whole: a poetic that is generous with inviting reflection.
One of the gifts of a poetry practice is the way it gives shape to the process of living. On the other hand, poetry helps us process grief when we are deep in it, and I wondered if this collection would stay entirely in that mode, namely, the wading through emotions and the attempts at sense-making. There is much of that, but this poetry leans compellingly into the shape of living-through. It explores and activates many micro actions: what it takes to open to and fully reflect the love that burns at the core of grief.
Some of the shapes in this book are given forms, like the sonnet and pantoum. Prescott stretches them to meet the process, like in the poem titled “We Used to Have More Time,” which is a sonnet-like poem that extends to include an extra quatrain, as though adding an extra bit of time. The abecedarian, called “Impossible Care Package” (p. 22-23) addresses to her son an alphabetical list of things she would like to send him “over there,” as though he were only away at college. There’s humor as she teases, asking if he needs a robe or mentioning his likes/dislikes. But it stretches past its conceit with the stanza for the letter “Z.”
Zero. What you need now, what you ever needed, the little you asked for while in the body. The postage is impossible to calculate, but I cannot shake the catalog of your needs, the list that rewrote itself for the span of your life. You left at a natural cleaving point, just on time, but too soon, and you went too far for this motherbrain, for her animal heart.
Voicings like this are devastating, and Prescott’s poems are often this prosy and direct. But overall, there’s a gentle, free-verse poetic. She includes four poems titled “Fallen Poem” in the book, and each has a different form, stretching the style of her poetic, with the middle two using visual space on the page to free the poem to fly:
tonight let’s circle the moon
let’s trace the arcs
to notice
how light how absence
how phosphorescence
finds us
like sugar cubes
rubbed together
in the dark
(p. 16-17)
The process of living (and of letting go and of holding on) that Prescott creates in the collection reaches an emotional climax at the poems titled “Fight” and “Enlightened, Exalted.” She reaches to embrace heaven and earth, and in “Rockstar Mom” (p. 69), she describes it directly:
the heart of Rockstar
Mom is hot, is whirling, is boiling over,
without a center. The Rockstar Mom throws
herself into the sky in search of the child,
and the child is back to star, back to stardust,
back to the space between matter, back
to light, and the mom, the mom, the mom without
her rock, the mom without her star
must work beyond time to find him.
Beyond her work as a poet, Prescott puts her generous spirit into more areas for supporting others. On her website (https://www.catherineespositoprescott.com/about) I learned that she teaches yoga philosophy, facilitates a spiritual book club, co-leads yoga and writing retreats (Spark Retreat), and is an affiliate leader for Helping Parents Heal (HPH), a support group for parents with children in spirit. Prescott is also a co-founder of SWWIM and editor-in-chief of the poem-a-day journal SWWIM Every Day. She is also the author of three other poetry collections: Accidental Garden (Gunpowder Press, 2023, winner of the Barry Spacks Poetry Prize), Maria Sings (dancing girl press, 2017), and The Living Ruin (Finishing Line Press, 2012).
This collection of poems, written with a living, shapeshifting love, quietly illuminates the raw energy that pulses through close relationships—an awareness that I wish to keep close to me every day.
Superbloom by Catherine Esposito Prescott
Gunpowder Press, 2026
Paper, 83 pages
978-1-957062-27-3
A. Anupama is a Tamil-American poet, artist, and translator whose work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Tupelo Quarterly, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Her poetry chapbook Saffron Threaded is available from Dancing Girl Press. Anupama lives with her family in Upper Nyack, New York. More about her at aanupama.com.