If There Is a Butterfly That Drinks Tears
If There Is a Butterfly That Drinks Tears is the second full-length collection from award-winning poet Natalie Damjanovich-Napoleon.
Exploring one the most personal and politically charged experiences in many women’s lives — motherhood — this collection of poems was born within the vortex of America’s changing social landscape as Obama’s message of inclusion gave way to a wave of Trump emboldened exclusion.
Using various poetic styles ranging from the avant-garde techniques of erasure and cut-up poetry to re- working of traditional forms such as the ghazal, pantoum and sestina, the work encourages the reader to venture beyond the clichés of motherhood to not only explore its intimacy and beauty, but its deep and abiding contradictions.
Exploring subject matter such as the choices we make to become mothers or not, the contents of a little boy’s pockets on wash day, fractured hearts, broken tea cups, and the destruction of a butterfly chrysalis by a toddler joyfully oblivious to consequence, If There Is a Butterfly That Drinks Tears is an unvarnished and revealing recounting of one woman’s journey through motherhood.
Natalie Damjanovich-Napoleon (D-Napoleon) is an award-winning poet, teacher and non-fiction writer.
She spent the last decade in the United States where she gave birth to her son and then worked as a Coordinator at a City College Writing Centre. Her poetry and creative non-fiction have appeared in Meanjin, Cordite, The Found Poetry Review, Westerly, Australian Poetry Journal and Writer’s Digest (US). Natalie’s work has been widely anthologised in both the United States and Australia.
Her poem ‘First Blood: A Sestina’ won the prestigious Bruce Dawe National Poetry Prize. Subsequently, her debut poetry book First Blood (Ginninderra Press) was released. In 2019, she won the KSP Poetry Prize. Currently, Natalie is teaching writing and ESL while completing a PhD on erasure poetry and historic amnesia. If There Is a Butterfly That Drinks Tears is her second poetry collection.
She lives in Walyalup/Fremantle with her husband, son and rescue cat, Sylvia.
