The death of a loved one is a highly charged intersection between grief and mental health, and there hasn’t been a book that thrust me to this point so quickly as Catherine Esposito Prescott’s Superbloom.
Esposito Prescott, the mother of Austen, a boy in his senior year of high school, was preparing for what all parents in this phase do: senior sports ceremonies, scholarship/college application seasons, prom, graduation… only to find herself facing what no one can ever fully prepared to face: her son’s sudden, terminal, inoperable, untreatable brain cancer diagnosis. She funnels her grief into this collection of poems, serving as an honest portrayal of what no one should have to endure and a gorgeous memorialization of Austen, not just of his journey post-diagnosis. Superbloom is unapologetically stream of conscious and vulnerable, allowing readers to explore the full spectrum of grief and love from a mother facing unfathomable loss.
Something special about how this collection is organized is Esposito Prescott’s multiple series within the collection. There’s several poems titled “Fallen Poem,” for example, as well as a series of “Meditation on [ ].” This is almost a way to compartmentalize the unfathomable. Grief often feels like a wild animal, sometimes lurking out of sight and sometimes lunging from the brush, teeth bared. These series help both reader and speaker alike organize grieving thoughts.
Specifically, the “Meditation on [ ]” series is a strong entryway into Esposito Prescott’s stream of consciousness and vulnerability, as every meditation does something special in voice, unique in image, and visceral all around. While most poems have an element of stream of consciousness in it, as this often feels most genuine in portraying written grief, I couldn’t help but really linger in the meditations on song and on the color yellow.
Unlike the other meditation poems, “Meditation on Song” is broken into sections, the speaker leading with the birth of her daughter, which is inherently a bit surprising, as much of the book focuses on the life, decline, and death of her son. The poem goes into the idea of the lullaby, songs associated with birth and new beginnings. The speaker then makes a leap for the second section:
In ancient times,
it was believed
that words called life
into existence,
sonic building
blocks created
the world
and sustained it.
Our work
was to praise
the energy
at the source
through sound.
This jump in scope is a great use of stream of consciousness, showing a lack of linearity (which, I mean, healing is not linear, so this leap is doing a lot of work for this poem). This particular leap also opens up an element of vulnerability that isn’t touched on in quite the same way as in other poems.
This idea of someone’s words bringing things, people, and realities into life is both a powerful and cursed incantation. Here, following the mention of the speaker’s daughter, the idea of song as spell is a beautiful thing, a wish of anything bountiful for this new baby.
What’s more painful, and very telling within the grief journey, is what goes unsaid in this poem. While this section dives into essentially manifesting reality through our words, and how positive this could be for that new baby girl at the beginning of the poem, the reader knows what this book is about. The speaker, especially without saying it, even more powerfully because she didn’t say it, “says” a great deal about incantation:
“What spell did I miss saying for Austen?”
“What spell could I have used to save him?”
“Is any spell strong enough to protect anyone from the inevitable end?”
In the final section of this poem, the speaker thinks to birdsongs, specifically to a mockingbird who visited her daily at the last place her family lived:
When I sang, she returned my song.
I don’t know if she was instructing
me where to find breakfast
or if a storm was coming…
It was a hard year,
and I sang every day…
She answered,
both of us chanting
I am here. I am here.
The speaker is using incantation to make herself “here,” even though she feels anything other than herself, than mother, than whole, with this grief. Also, the fact that the bird singing back is a mockingbird? Mockingbirds don’t have their own sound, just what’s spoken around them. This bird is essentially an echo of the speaker, when really, the speaker likely wishes someone were there to say, “Don’t worry, momma. You’ve been so strong; I got you. I’m here.” When those words, said not as an echo but as support, can be the anchor a grieving person needs.
But also, there’s the fact that trying to enchant “I am here” can’t wish someone back into existence once they’re gone. That our efforts and our words can’t reunite us with the departed.
While there’s a great deal of vulnerability in the stream of consciousness leaps within the next poem, “Meditation on Yellow,” I want to take a moment to highlight the raw vulnerability of it. This poem starts out with comparisons and associations we make with the subject under meditation. For yellow, that’s: “…sunflowers, and bananas, and the sun, / the afterglow of its set and its rise… // starshine, between green and orange, daffodils, /aspens in late autumn, leaves in decay, dying,” (pg 53, lns 2-3, 5-6). These jumps in comparisons are interesting and strong in association with the book’s themes, but this isn’t necessarily where the vulnerability lives. It’s here:
What is my job
here, as a mother missing her son? There are no words
for a mother without her son—not widowed or widower,
not unmothered—
I think this is a part of grief that isn’t talked about much. We exist and mesh with all those we have existed close with. We are our parents, our grandparents, our siblings, our friends, our spouses, our exes—
The role of parenthood is gifted because of the gift of a child. Even in a child’s untimely passing, this title of “parent” isn’t revoked. And being the birthing parent, going through the process of bringing life into the world—there’s no taking that away.
And I think this is the most vulnerable piece of all. When a parent loses a child, and when a birthing parent loses the person they brought into the world, there is a part of the parent that dies with that child. A part that is still lost despite potentially having other children to parent, or having to parent parents, etc.
It’s a dying that occurs while the parent is still breathing, still witnessing those meditations on yellow, on song, and having to proclaim “I am here,” when really, those words are more mockingbird than incantation, wish as we may.
This form of grief is devastating, almost impossible to name and portray, yet Catherine Esposito Prescott does it with honesty and depth in Superbloom, capturing both the lurking creature and the bared teeth one within one stunning collection of poems. Because of her work to say, and not say, what she can about her experiences, Austen’s stories live on as “…bouquets of light—broken stars, / shards of lit bulbs, stems of sunlight,” (“The Beautiful Goodbye,” lns 2-3) so that we, too, can see “…the outline of a crocodile, the mane / of a horse crossing, a few unnameable beasts,” (“The Visitation, lns 19-20).
Read this gorgeous book for yourself by buying a copy of Superbloom, published by Gunpowder Press. Also keep up to date on Catherine’s writing @catprescott on Instagram, on her website https://www.catherineespositoprescott.com/, and by subscribing to her Substack Catherine Esposito Prescott
If you’ve read Superbloom how did the book move you?
What book would you like to see on the Healing Shelf in the future?
Love this book. And was honored to get to know Austen through Catherine’s writing. ❤️