Python Love

Python Love weaves together experiences of childhood abuse, birth trauma, and recovery from the perspective of a medical doctor who is also a mother. In her debut collection, Shannon Arntfield delves into the many ways in which the body recalls what has been done to it. Long, breathtaking sequences set within medical facilities during labour and delivery are juxtaposed with spare, lyrical reflections on ideas of memory, natural spaces, implicit love, and the relationships between parents and children. Full of precise observations, careful renderings, and visceral originality, Python Love is focused on how the body and mind are inextricably linked, how the past can overwhelm and inform the present, and how recovery is tied to love and connection.
Python Love is a collection of free verse poetry weaving together experiences of childhood abuse and birth trauma from the perspective of a medical doctor who is also a mother.
Python Love is a collection of free verse poetry weaving together experiences of childhood abuse and birth trauma from the perspective of a medical doctor who is also a mother.
"'I remember…becoming one of the machines,' Shannon Arntfield writes in her steely debut collection, an exploration of the brutal sides of medicine and motherhood, where trauma conspires to short-circuit the present. Python Love is a compassionate lament for living in a body that says no." Monica Kidd, author of Chance Encounters with Wild Animals
"Python Love holds its lines in isolation-granules of memory spent at the intersections of birth and death, childhood abuse, and moments of healing. Vulnerable and investigative, this book quietly seeks to find meaning in the difficult moments while unflinchingly refusing to look away." Christine McNair, author of Toxemia



• Arguing with No One


• 1.


• Bedrest Lament


• Python Love


• The Books Said


• Tidal Pools with My Mother


• Permeable Membrane


• On the Pacific Coast with My Father


• Hand in Hand, We Brought Back the Ground


• Maze Masquerading as a Mangrove Forest


• The Woman Beneath the Sheet


• Blue and Pink Bottles Representing Children


• 2.


• The Same Yellow Tiled Walls


• 3.


• Windless Sea


• Child's Play


• Clues


• Car Wash


• Reckoning


• Get Away


• Swamp Wading


• Tickle Attack


• When My Daughter Turned Eight


• God


• 4.


• Fallen Horseman


• 5.


• Apollo


• Fatu Hiva


• Between Us


• The Bridge Between the Mountains


• I Have Passed Through


• Lichen Sclerosis


• The Stone the Builders Rejected


• Animal, Misunderstood


• Wild Iris


• Quiet, rarely


• 6.


• Alive. Intact. Unharmed.


• Acknowledgements