Love & Other Cancers by Olivia Thomakos

Description

The poems in Love & Other Cancers are deeply personal yet universally resonant, deftly exploring the struggles of our life journeys as we discover ourselves and navigate familial, friendly, and romantic relationships through seasons of illness, loss, and change.

Olivia Thomakos is an Ohio-born writer, teacher, and editor. Her poem ‘What You Wish For’ won the 2022 Grierson Verse Prize. She is Poetry Editor of Origin Stories: An Anthology of Beginnings and Managing Editor of Tiny Flames: Voices from Ukraine, both with Forest Publishing. Her poetry can be found in Gutter, Berfrois, and elsewhere. www.oliviathomakos.com

A moving, rich and assured debut pamphlet that flows through a circuit of veins containing cancer, clinics, incomprehensible doctors, musical notation [rests] and (I didn’t say it) love. Any poetry that invokes ‘buzzards’ is alright with me.
– Nicky Melville

This terrific debut pamphlet is many things: deft, lyrical, assured, formally playful. A tender, healing work, Thomakos takes us inside womanhood, family, diagnoses and treatments with detail and precision, and she makes us feel every word.
– Jane McKie

‘Love And Other Cancers’ stretches the mind’s eye with a language of deep attention and meticulous, hopeful curiosity. Here are poems of stillness and longing, of piecing things together, of tricks of the light. Language becomes a way of seeing what is around us, but at the same time draws attention to all that cannot be seen, to what is hidden, knotted, out of reach. Pain slips in but doesn’t disturb or demand. It is part of a delicate whole in which everything has its own makeshift – yet vivid – awareness. There is beautiful sense of acceptance in this book for all that there is, felt deeply, witnessed tenderly. The precariousness of bodies, the ever dancing presence of the past, humour in the mundane, and ultimately, love.
– Tessa Berring

Olivia Thomakos’ ‘Love & Other Cancers’ offers musicality and excitement throughout. ‘Earth peels like an orange’ on one page (‘Molting’), while ‘Your sundial ancestor calls’ on another (‘A Love Letter’). Thomakos’ writing feels conversational and confessional but also controlled and measured. There is a lightness to it and yet nothing feels written simply for the sake of it. An assured debut, and one I’m excited to read again.
– Sean Wai Keung