On the Subject of Blackberries

Stay Out of the Garden

Welcome to the garden. Here we poison our fruits, pierce ourselves with thorns, and transform under the light of the full moon. Mad and unhinged, we fall through rabbit holes, walk willingly into fairy rings, and dance in the song of witchcraft, two snakes around our ankles, the juice of berries on our tongues.Inspired by Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle, these poems are meditations on female rage, postpartum depression, compulsion, and intrusive thoughts. They pull from periods of sleep deprivation, soul exhaustion, and nightmarish delusions, and each is left untitled, a nod to the stream-of-conscious mind of a new mother.
Using found poetry and under the influence of bibliomancy, Wytovich harnesses the occult power of her imagery and words and aligns it with a new, more vulnerable, darkness. These pieces are not only visions of the madwoman in the attic, but ghostly visitations that explore the raw mental torture women sometimes experience after giving birth.
This collection heals as much as it scars, and is an honest look at how trauma seeps into the soil of our bodies. Her poems are imagined horrors, fictional fears, and all the unspoken murmurs of a mind lost between reality and dream. What she leaves in her wake is nothing short of horror-the children lost, the garden dead, the women feral, ready to pounce.
Advance Praise

"What witchcraft is this? These poems are somehow delicate as lace yet razor sharp. Lovely yet venomous. Visceral and emotional, eerie and honest. This collection is essential and in perfect conversation with Shirley Jackson's Blackwood Sisters." -Rachel Harrison, national bestselling author of Cackle and Black Sheep

"To read "On the Subject of Blackberries" is to be thrown into a world of dread but also immense beauty. This is a collection that is wandering the halls in the night with a candle threatening to go out. Stephanie Wytovich taps into the brutal and magical experience of motherhood with poems that are lush and barbed, connecting the maternal with the feral in ways that are unexpected and unforgettable. A hypnotic collection."-Patricia Grisafi, PhD, author of Breaking Down Plath and Animal

Stephanie Wytovich's On the Subject of Blackberries is an uncomfortable collection. Petal-pressed and pulsing with politeness, her poetry is unflinching in its honesty, each poem a bewitchingly beautiful slurp at the horror of motherhood. A devastating work. Wytovich is synonymous with horror poetry. -Lee Murray, five-time Bram Stoker Award winner, co-author of Tortured Willows