Eclipsing the Blue Violets, by Frances Emilia

Poetry, chapbook, 28 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

Eclipsing the Blue Violets navigates the complexities of mourning a loss and surviving sexual assault. Through manipulating the sense of time, setting and the body, the speaker challenges conventions of what it looks like to live within oneself while grieving. In dissecting the themes of unraveling and mending, elements such as gender come into question, calling to a closeness of maternal relationships.

The grandmother’s death provokes a dreamlike, even nightmarish, reality consisting of yearning and memory hopping. Frances Emilia's chapbook carries many small moments of anguish, but also of power, ending in a glimmer of brightness and rebirth.

Frances Emilia is a graduate of Columbia College Chicago in Interdisciplinary Creative Writing (poetry) and Fine Art. Beyond her writing, she pursues a second career in beauty and personal care. This is her first book.