Reviews for Award Winning 'Cancer Courts My Mother' by LindaAnn LoSchiavo

What do Experienced Reviewers Have to Say about "Cancer Courts My Mother" by Award Winning Poet & Writer LindaAnn LoSchiavo ?

RALEIGH, NC, UNITED STATES, December 16, 2025 /EINPresswire.com/ -- About "Cancer Courts My Mother"

Book Awards:
Winner of The BREW Seal of Excellence Award—from The Chrysalis BREW Project
Winner of the Voyages of Verses Book Award—from One Tribune
Award nomination: CLMP’s Firecracker Award

Death ends a life but memories hang on.
"Cancer Courts My Mother" gives voice to the creativity borne out of the experience of late-stage cancer from the perspective of a caregiver and a daughter.
Written with candor, warmth, and grace, these poems explore universal themes of sorrow, resiliency, relationships, anger, hope, and love.
This collection is for anyone who's ever wondered how to go forward in the face of suffering, but doesn't expect an easy answer.
Cancer, a Casanova, is bent on seducing a mother away from her family—even as a dutiful daughter tries to defeat him.

Haiku summary:

cancer’s intrusions
can’t stop a relationship
from healing

This is a sampling of several reviews of this well executed poetry collection:

From Billy Mills: LindaAnn LoSchiavo’s Cancer Courts My Mother comprises a set of poems that deal with the relationship between an adult daughter carer and her terminally ill mother when that relationship starts from a place that might best be described as problematic. The nature of the relationship is set before the reader early, in ‘Mother Magnified’, the second piece in the collection, in prose:

It was my mother who marked the start of when my life was being archived. According to her, everything was my fault. Such distorted reflections became a burden, a sour aftertaste…

…Eventually, I became a vegetarian, refusing to eat anything that had a mother.

As the illness progresses, the relationship improves as the mother slides into a medication-induced fantasy world of escape:

Mom’s travelling through Tinseltown and Rome
Of sixty years ago, a fond time when
Magnani commandeered “The Rose Tattoo.”
Perhaps to mother films were fancy cures.
(from ‘Mother on Morphine, Dreaming of Anna Magnani’)

Meanwhile the daughter tends her mother’s prized plants, as an analogy of the more difficult process of human care:

Eight Weeks Later:

morning glories lift
their arms in supplication
doctor prescribes patience.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of LoSchiavo’s exploration of grief, love and loss in these poems is her careful deployment of multiple formal approaches, there are a number of very fine haiku (including the one quoted just above), a sonnet, several prose pieces, a haibun, a kind of free villanelle, an acrostic, a cento and a number of rhyming and non-rhyming free forms. And when she uses simile (as opposed to the plant/mother analogy), she does so to good effect:

Before my mother died at home, she learned
That cancer’s like a Depression Era
Endurance contest: the dance marathon,
Odds stacked against her, swaying in slow mode.
(from ‘My Mother’s Ghost Dancing’)

In the end, the odds are not beaten, and daughter and the previously near-invisible husband/father are left to deal with tangible symbols of loss:

Deprived by his wife’s absence, grieving guts
My father. The cremation over now,
Her ashes urned and glowing with repose,
Inspection of her closet is the next
Unmaking, contents intimate, perfumed.
(from ‘The Closet as She Left It’)

Unlike previous books by LoSchiavo that I’ve reviewed, the element of the macabre is missing in this pamphlet, we are faced here by real death, not its fantasy simulacrum. Perhaps as a result, this is the most accomplished set of poems by her I’ve read.
~~~
High Acclaim:

"When an adult child becomes caretaker for a parent with cancer, family dynamics shift profoundly. In "Cancer Courts My Mother," LindaAnn LoSchiavo captures this complex journey through poetry that balances tenderness with brutal honesty. She navigates caregiving's challenges with grace, inviting readers to witness the delicate interplay of love and fear while portraying her mother as a fully realized, complex human being. The journey isn't pretty—sometimes the words are fierce—but this collection digs deep into universal experiences of loss and care."

~Kellie Scott Reed, Poetry Editor, Roi Fainéant (USA)

"In "Cancer Courts My Mother," LindaAnn LoSchiavo chronicles an emotional journey through varied poetic forms. She weaves a metaphor of nurturing plants back to life while her mother finds remission, then faces cancer's return. The collection reconciles memories of a difficult mother with the current, vulnerable one—"Bad memories are cadavers that refuse burial." As both subject and narrator, LoSchiavo illuminates the delicate balance between personal autonomy and familial duty."

~Karen Cline-Tardiff, poet and Editor-in-Chief of Gnashing Teeth Publishing (USA)

"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."

~Matt Potter, Editor-in-Chief of Pure Slush Publishing (Australia) and author of "Hamburgers and Berliners"

"Eerily realistic. . . . There's a variety of poetry types represented in this collection. I can imagine the author sitting by her mother's bedside writing down her
feelings in the moment while her mom plays "an unfamiliar role" every day in her cancer journey. The "unfamiliar role" line resonated with me. This line, from the poem "Mother on Morphine, Dreaming of Anna Magnani," was my favorite. You never know what cancer will bring, so she really was playing an unknown role, as was her caregiver. I also especially like the cover art [on Cancer Courts My Mother]. The mom looks like she's all ready to beat cancer; dancing with death should be easy...but the daughter sees the handwriting on the wall. Well done!

~Rebecca Linam on GoodReads

More Reviews on GoodReads

Lisa Tomey-Zonneveld
Prolific PulsePress LLC
admin@prolificpulse.com
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