If You Would Let Me

If You Would Let Me uses the myth of Persephone and Demeter to explore, in an utterly contemporary idiom, the hellish descents and unequivocal love of a mother and an adolescent child. The old story is reimagined in new terms—a present-day Persephone’s cycles of psychic affliction giving rise to botched facial piercings, social media ghostings, and squalls of physical fury—and revoiced in poems that sing Demeter’s rage, the depths of maternal grief, the seasons of erasure and renewal. In an...