Lissa Batista

Eve may have been deceived by the serpent, but the mother in Ouroboros defangs that snake.  Lissa Batista writes exquisite poems celebrating mothers who are full people, sexual beings, with wants and desires beyond caring for their children. From beauty pageant queens to women with “long-colored hair eddying in the wind with split ends,” the mothers in these poems are fierce and free. Batista transports us from Brazil to Miami, from Carnaval to Pottery Barn, through ghazals, haibun, villanelles, and prose poems, delivering a most divine depiction of feminine experience.

–Denise Duhamel

There’s no poem quite like a Lissa Batista poem—where snakes are defanged by teenage girls, “the morning coffee makes itself,” and everyone talks back to ghosts. This debut chapbook is a portrait of the speaker’s mother, the speaker as mother, and a paean to the “nakedly vulnerable” truths both women carry, in their lives with children and their lives with men. What else can I say? Ouroboros is brilliant, in both the dazzling and the whip-smart sense. It will haunt and inspire you.