In Death of Persephone, the patriarchal myth of the maiden taken, raped, and made the potent and sexualized queen of the underworld is questioned, altered, flipped. Instead, we have Stephanie, a girl of seven, taken and raised by her Uncle H. who is obsessed by her, tries to control her, to keep her, to have her even as she blooms out from underneath him.

In poems both lyrical and narrative, a woman paints Hecate on a building, a Hyacinth Macaw flies overhead, a detective bumbles from crime to crime. This is a city with a vast underground where bats hang and paperwhites bloom, a city where men still rule.

Who sees what, who will pay, and who will survive in this ancient story altered at the core?

Yvonne Blomer is the author of four poetry collections, including The Last Show on Earth, which was published with Caitlin Press in 2022, and As if a Raven (Palimpsest Press, 2015); in the fall of 2022 Palimpsest Press released Book of Places: 10th Anniversary Edition. Yvonne is the editor of the anthologies Refugium: Poems for the Pacific and Sweet Water: Poems for the Watersheds (Caitlin Press, 2017 and 2021). Sugar Ride: Cycling from Hanoi to Kuala Lumpur (Palimpsest Press, 2017) is her travel memoir exploring body, time, and travel. Yvonne is the past Poet Laureate of Victoria, BC, and the past Artistic Director of the weekly reading series Planet Earth Poetry; Yvonne is Arc Poetry Magazine’s current poet-in-residence for 2022-2023. She lives on the traditional territories of the Lək̓ʷəŋən (Lekwungen) people in Victoria, BC. www.yvonneblomer.com

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“Hardboiled detective tropes meet classical myths and free-form poetry. A breathtaking work of imaginative cross-pollination. Post-modern in absolutely the best sense of the word.”

—Will Ferguson, Giller Prize-winning author of 419

“Complex, layered, and deeply allusive, Blomer’s startling narrative poem combines a reinterpretation of myth with a reimagining of mystery. The reader becomes a flâneuse, bravely walking the language corridors and striding through a gritty, glittery, real and mythic city. A beguiling interweaving of code-switching and genre-shifting, Death of Persephone: A Murder rewrites the myth of what women can become.”

—Méira Cook, author of The Full Catastrophe

“In Death of Persephone, Blomer stalks back alleys, asking urgent questions: Why is the violence against women and girls in myth still haunting us today? Blomer is a poet at the height of her powers, her stanzas blooming with paperwhites, blazing with graffiti. And so the reader gets to be the grieving mother, the doomed daughter, and the hell-bent detective, as Blomer walks us out of the old story and into this essential retelling.”

—Ariel Gordon, poet and author of Fungal: Foraging in the Urban Forest