Python Love

by Shannon Arntfield

Overview

Python Love weaves together experiences of childhood abuse, birth trauma, and recovery from the perspective of a medical doctor who is also a mother. In her debut collection, Shannon Arntfield delves into the many ways in which the body recalls what has been done to it. Long, breathtaking sequences set within medical facilities during labour and delivery are juxtaposed with spare, lyrical reflections on ideas of memory, natural spaces, implicit love, and the relationships between parents and children. Full of precise observations, careful renderings, and visceral originality, Python Love is focused on how the body and mind are inextricably linked, how the past can overwhelm and inform the present, and how recovery is tied to love and connection.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781772127959
Publisher:	University of Alberta Press
Publication date:	02/13/2025
Series:	Robert Kroetsch Series
Pages:	80
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.25(d)

About the Author

Shannon Arntfield is a second career trauma-informed therapist and poet who turned to writing and psychological care in response to her lived experience as a child-mother-daughter and obstetrician-gynecologist. Her writing explores the bodymind continuum, the transformative power of vulnerability, and the challenges and rewards of renegotiating trauma. Her debut chapbook is Fallen Horseman and individual poems have appeared in Contemporary Verse 2, PRISM International, The Antigonish Review, The Examined Life, and Snapdragon Journal. From 2004 to 2022, she trained and worked as an ob/gyn, caring for women across their reproductive lifetime. In this role, she became sensitized to the impact and prevalence of trauma—both in the lives of women and their families, and among caring professionals. In 2020, she chose to re-train in counseling to serve the needs of people affected by trauma. She lives in London, Ontario, the traditional lands of the Anishinaabek, Haudenosaunee, Lūnaapéewak, and Attawandaron.

Table of Contents

• Arguing with No One
• 1.
• Bedrest Lament
• Python Love
• The Books Said
• Tidal Pools with My Mother
• Permeable Membrane
• On the Pacific Coast with My Father
• Hand in Hand, We Brought Back the Ground
• Maze Masquerading as a Mangrove Forest
• The Woman Beneath the Sheet
• Blue and Pink Bottles Representing Children
• 2.
• The Same Yellow Tiled Walls
• 3.
• Windless Sea
• Child’s Play
• Clues
• Car Wash
• Reckoning
• Get Away
• Swamp Wading
• Tickle Attack
• When My Daughter Turned Eight
• God
• 4.
• Fallen Horseman
• 5.
• Apollo
• Fatu Hiva
• Between Us
• The Bridge Between the Mountains
• I Have Passed Through
• Lichen Sclerosis
• The Stone the Builders Rejected
• Animal, Misunderstood
• Wild Iris
• Quiet, rarely
• 6.
• Alive. Intact. Unharmed.
• Acknowledgements

Editorial Reviews

"'I remember…becoming one of the machines,' Shannon Arntfield writes in her steely debut collection, an exploration of the brutal sides of medicine and motherhood, where trauma conspires to short-circuit the present. Python Love is a compassionate lament for living in a body that says no." Monica Kidd, author of Chance Encounters with Wild Animals

"Python Love holds its lines in isolation—granules of memory spent at the intersections of birth and death, childhood abuse, and moments of healing. Vulnerable and investigative, this book quietly seeks to find meaning in the difficult moments while unflinchingly refusing to look away." Christine McNair, author of Toxemia

From the Publisher