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The art on the cover of Canadian author Fawn Parker’s Soft Inheritance is easily recognizable to anyone who was raised Catholic, or anyone who researches and looks to the Catholic saints for connection when life snatches away all their people. It’s St. Agatha’s dainty hands, holding up a platter on which her detached, supple breasts are formally presented. It makes one morbidly think of martyrdom. That, and the final dessert course of a lavish meal (they kind of look like milk puddings). But though readers will approach Parker’s 2023 assemblage of freestyle poetry with the mission of determining who in the book is martyred, they will find that the answer is no one and nothing. There are no voluntary, divine sacrifices in Parker’s semi-memoir, just the regular trials of life. Yet they are no less noble.

This collection of prose may be called Soft Inheritance, but its subject matter and tone are anything but soft. It’s needle-pointed, gritty, and unflinching. Parker’s mother is diagnosed with breast cancer, and it ultimately claims her life. All Parker is left with is some of her mother’s material possessions, depression, and material to weld into dark, angry poetry. From all this she must somehow salvage the will to go on and continue her mother’s legacy. Even when the narrative transitions to some of her unsteady romances and sexual affairs, her mother’s presence lingers, a background fixture, not necessarily spoiling her daughter’s new chapter but setting the aura.

At the very beginning, readers encounter Parker’s fire-forged hard side, ready to strike, like a dragon that’s decided to appear in the story earlier than expected. Parker doesn’t hold back her rage, she unleashes it. There is a fearsome story to start with, a tooth-and-nail conflict. It is women — insecure, mistreated women — versus men. Raw resentment practically hisses off the page, such as in “Fasting for God:”

“I was introduced to the idea of starvation at the mercy of men by my mother.

Walking into the parting crowd she pointed and said,

‘He loves you, he loves you.’ When she’s wrong, I blame the men.”

But then the focus of the prose shifts. Men — the branch of unreliable, perpetually inconsistent men who feature in Parker’s life — are not entirely discarded, but rather shifted to the sidelines. Readers accompany Parker through the process of first learning to navigate life with a terminally ill mother, and then with no mother at all. The loving mother-daughter relationship — or caretaker-patient relationship — transcends death and defies Parker’s anxieties about the dangerous “gene” she may have inherited. She loves her mother aggressively, defiantly, and holds no grudge against her either for getting sick, dying, or potentially leaving her to the same perilous future fate.

Parker is a rare writer who has no interest whatsoever in romanticizing breasts or especially romanticizing her mother’s mastectomy as part of the cancer treatment. She declines painting the procedure as a diminishing of her mother’s personhood, a subtraction. Breasts, according to Parker, are not an indicator of beauty or a sexualized symbol of perfect femininity. They’re just there, and sometimes they have to go. The descriptions Parker utilizes to make this point aren’t overly vulgar, as in “Golden Rays of Chemo,” but they aren’t necessarily shy either:

“A large left lump skewing the skin like a sickle like a stump like

weak spot in a balloon

The broken latex over shellac the oil in the ocean the come and go

2017 was the summer of my mother’s breasts.”

Parker’s unconventional phrases and images reclaim breasts as real parts of human anatomy and teaches readers that they are as susceptible to infection and removeable as a soldier’s gangrenous limb. Agatha’s perfect goddess breasts, the cover image, are a myth. Breasts in the mortal world, as bravely proven by Parker’s mother, are not proudly offered up on a plate in mint condition. If they’re healthy, they’re confined inside a bra and annoyingly ogled at if just a little bit exposed. If they’re diseased, they’re sliced off and disposed of as medical waste. But, as Parker demonstrates through her mother’s resilience and her own, the fear this thought may evoke can be overcome by acceptance.

The timeline of the poems may come across as a bit jagged to some. That is because many of them were originally published in established Canadian journals such as The Ex-Puritan and Vallum and later gathered into a single volume. Soft Inheritance as a whole is not an easy read for someone experiencing loss and grief, but Parker’s prose can also provide a sort of comforting, spiritual companionship to a fellow sufferer and survivor, much like the existence of the saints for many. It’s a “You are not alone” sort of book. It’s short, at less than a hundred pages, but powerful and worthwhile.