Her paraphernalia

How does a contemporary woman write a life's umbilical attachments to the lives around her, lives formed in and by other histories and times, relations living and dying and dead? How does she see what remains her own, despite midlife's losses? Widely acclaimed for her poetry, Canadian writer Margaret Christakos's new intergenre collection is a love song to her mother and daughter. Formed of ten intimate etudes that move from considerations of mothering, sex and photography to settler bloodlines, erasure and divorce, HER PARAPHERNALIA profoundly embodies the feelings of living as a woman and a mother in all its tumult and precocity and promise. At once daring, erotic and original, HER PARAPHERNALIA explores the beauty of the selfie, menopause, daughters, lust, solo travel, depression, the death of a parent, the writing life and women's transgenerational vitality, among other interwoven themes.