healing – Prolific Pulse Blog

Defying expectations, a caregiver’s journey is told as a story of adultery.
   In "Cancer Courts My Mother" by LindaAnn LoSchiavo, disease becomes a Casanova.
Book Awards:
Winner of . . . .
Award nomination: The Brew Awards, nominee, The Chrysalis BREW Project
Award nomination: CLMP’s Firecracker Award

In "Cancer Courts My Mother," a daughter becomes caregiver to her
abusive, soul-scorching mother, discovering that tending to the dying can unexpectedly
heal the living. In this intimate drama, cancer plays Casanova—a relentless suitor
determined to steal a mother from her family.
Essence: Defying expectations, a caregiver’s journey is told as a story of adultery.
In "Cancer Courts My Mother" by LindaAnn LoSchiavo, disease becomes a
Casanova.
Death ends a life but memories hang on.

Haiku Summary:

Cancer’s intrusions
cannot prevent lifelong wounds
from healing

Advanced Acclaim:

When an adult child becomes caretaker for a parent with cancer, family dynamics shift
profoundly. In “Cancer Courts My Mother,” LindaAnn LoSchiavo captures this complex
journey through poetry that balances tenderness with brutal honesty. She navigates
caregiving’s challenges with grace, inviting readers to witness the delicate interplay of
love and fear while portraying her mother as a fully realized, complex human being. The
journey isn’t pretty—sometimes the words are fierce—but this collection digs deep into
universal experiences of loss and care.
― Kellie Scott Reed, Poetry Editor, Roi Fainéant(USA)

In “Cancer Courts My Mother,” LindaAnn LoSchiavo chronicles an emotional journey
through varied poetic forms. She weaves a metaphor of nurturing plants back to life
while her mother finds remission, then faces cancer’s return. The collection reconciles
memories of a difficult mother with the current, vulnerable one—”Bad memories are
cadavers that refuse burial.” As both subject and narrator, LoSchiavo illuminates the
delicate balance between personal autonomy and familial duty.
― Karen Cline-Tardiff, poet and Editor-in-Chief of Gnashing Teeth Publishing
(USA)

Real and harried, purposeful and comprehensive, when understanding is sought and
reason is not always kind, “Cancer Courts My Mother” provides readers with great
measures of meaning.
― Matt Potter, Editor-in-Chief of Pure Slush Publishing (Australia) and
author of “Hamburgers and Berliners”

Peter Mladinic’s Review

Remembering Remission Christmas

They’d bickered over her like two suitors:
Vitality, her birthright, who had known
My mother well before her married life,
And Cancer, who’d mapped out his own terrain,
Unravelled secret strands of resistance,
Until oncologists chased him away.

Remission Christmas reunited us,
Our joy like steam escaping after frost.

I shipped my gifts to Florida ahead:
Biscotti, pignola cookies, torrone
From Little Italy, fine leather goods,
And for her green thumb, a red amaryllis.

But Safety Harbor’s Gulf of Mexico,
Producing Christmastime’s Cancerian
Heat in December, had confused this bulb.

Amidst the presents and nativity,
Its empty cradle strewn with straw, green life
Ripped up gay mummy wrapping, and tore loose,
Unhampered by its ground like Lazarus
Unbound. My parents, unprepared for ghosts
Of miracles, became unnerved by sounds
Newborn right by their crèche, the fir tree’s base,
Invisible and inexplicable
Like faith. Or like remission. After Mass,
They found a determined amaryllis, force
Which sleeps but cannot die, that mother took to heart.

LindaAnn LoSchiavo

Order Your Copy Today

While you are waiting for your copy to arrive, enjoy this interview with the lovely LindaAnn LoSchiavo

Announcements, Book Announcements, Celebrations

ANNOUNCEMENT! “Social Possibilities – Poetic Voices of Hope” has been released!

July 15, 2025 Lisa Tomey-Zonneveld

Social Possibilities – Poetic Voices of Hope is the result of a submissions call with the focus about possibilities to improve society. We asked the question” ” How can we bring hope?”

Zaneta V. Johns, Contributor and Co-Editor says it best with her introduction:

“Social Possibilities”is a literary sanctuary at a time of heightened uncertainty and distress. We assembled global poetic voices to ease our growing anxieties. We are faced with conflicting perspectives and occasional despair. This anthology is filled with thoughtful optimism. Rather than ignore the challenges facing our humanity, we lean in to acknowledge them while remaining hopeful. Poetry promotes understanding, empathy and compassion, which are crucial to bridging social and political divides. Featured poets illuminate a path to help you uphold justice. Similarly, we encourage you to challenge the status quo and not remain silent. Silence does not promote justice for the underserved. With unwavering devotion, please share your voice and light for the betterment of our global community.

This collection features poems that address themes of unity and serenity, ranging from calm to intense. From the first poem, “I Let Go,” through the last poem, “Into the Light,” these expressions are a compelling call to action. You will find personal insights, reassurance, and invaluable alternatives to fear and adversity. We celebrate these profound aspirations for a future of social connectedness.

It is not too late for The Beloved Community, envisioned and coined by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Armed with these impactful messages, let’s normalize kindness as an essential initial step toward harmony.”

Thank you to all the contributing poets for their prolific work.

You will find the links for purchase on ProlificPulse

Announcements, Book Announcements, poetry

Breaking Up With the Cobalt Blues – Poems for Healing is now available

August 1, 2024 Lisa Tomey-Zonneveld

Breaking Up With the Cobalt Blues – Poems for Healing is now available at major online stores. You can access links to these stores on ProlificPulse.com/ or check out Amazon, Barnes & Noble, BAM, or BookShop (Formerly IndieBound)

Lindsay Soberano Wilson’s second full-length book of poems, Breaking Up With the Cobalt Blues: Poems For Healing,finds peace in painful, messy, shameful parts of life unearthed at inconvenient times.

Poems about suicide, sexual assault, addiction, intergenerational trauma, domestic violence, Toronto 90s rave culture, and a pandemic, Breaking Up With the Cobalt Blues finds light in the darkness.

The visual and lyrical poems, shed light on hard truths while inspiring readers to “Dance Through the Dark” to find “Glimmers,” instead of tripping on triggers like the poem, “I Tripped on a Wound Today” about being a third-generation Holocaust survivor.

As the creator of Put It To Rest, a mental health literary online hub, Lindsay believes in putting painful stories to rest by writing them out to let them go: Breaking Up With the Cobalt Blues weaves in and out of childhood, coming of age, and adulthood on a healing journey to put the past behind, embrace the present, and trust the future.

In the opening poem, “I Call This Trauma”, the narrator discovers that untying “knots” to fix everything is fruitless, eventually turning to acceptance in “Hope, Are You There?” Breaking Up With The Cobalt Blues culminates in a heroic call to action to break up with victimhood to embrace trauma healing reflected in the beauty of the “northern lights.”

Breaking Up With the Cobalt Blues takes readers on a journey from victimization to becoming self-empowered curators of life, despite the freefall from grace into everyday beauty like being open to receiving “Glimmers.”

So just maybe one can never really break up with the “blues” but there’s no reason why the blues can’t morph into a softer hue that’s part of life rather than a defining moment.

Breaking Up With the Cobalt Blues is about making peace with grief and not letting the past define you but recreating a future that accepts that pain is a part of life, allowing growth. The concluding poem “Stay Gold” is a tribute to the friends we’ve lost too soon, accepting that only the good die young.

What Others Say

As a Member of the Feminist Caucus via the League of Canadian Poets Lindsay embodies the fraught contraries of a woman’s lived experience, as mother, daughter, granddaughter, so eloquently voiced in these poems.

She ennobles a strength of character and commitment so essential to overcoming intergenerational trauma and consequential familial suffering, by fashioning well-wrought gifts of insight and intuition.

As a shapeshifter, this poet limns a dazzling landscape of premonitions and obsessive thoughts, each word as from an impressionistic painting technique called “pointillism” when dashes of color are applied in distinct patterns to form an image.

While the invention of “cobalt blue” allowed much of the explosive creativity that we see in impressionist and Post-impressionist painting, the poet uses the plural to riff on its emotive and musical significance.

As a literary artist, she reveals in her newfound freedom of choice, extending her truth-telling abilities beyond a depressive dystopian worldview.

The poet as scapegoat nevertheless occupies a sacred, eternal space.

She “pens” what we recognize as the outward boundaries which arise from an epistemology based on heightened bodily impressions transmuted into art.

Assigning blame for reported past assignations simply affords due responsibility, in “How I Became a Poet.”

“Queen of the Sabbath” (and the entity) is the personification of the Jewish day of rest, Saturday. An allusion that she still possesses a prominent position in Judaic mythology is illustrative of tradition and poetic context.

The poet speaks of disenchantment in cyber space alongside dreams of monsters and ugly Medusa head.

“Release me from a litany of sorrows” is a rallying cry. “But the world’s handprints are still on me.”

What remains is “a muse in a cage.”

As muse she envies “[Leonard] Cohen’s Lover, like Suzanne because she’s tameless and irresistible…”

In “How to Live” the advice is: 1. Be Too Much (because more is more) and 2. Love out loud.

Anne Burke Literary Editor of The Prairie Journal

The loss of a loved one through suicide rips one’s entire life apart, almost. Lindsay Soberano Wilson deals with that loss unflinchingly in these poems. From pain,she wrought beauty, from chaos and despair an affirmation of self, as a human being, a woman, a poet. Poetry is “something to lose yourself in and find yourself in.” Cobalt Blues constitutes a journey that Soberano Wilson makes ours through her resilience and love of words. She is a survivor: ultimately her book celebrates being here like in the poem “When I Climb Out of the Darkness.” Breaking Up with the Cobalt Blues is the beacon of light. –

Peter Mladinic, author of House Sitting and The Homesick Mortician.

Poetry can serve all the purposes for the reader and writer. For the writer, Lindsay, it’s a method to document the past and learn from it…to be empowered by it. Lindsay’s poems in her epic collection Breaking Up With the Cobalt Blues purge and process the difficulties of her experiences into quantifiable outbursts of creative prose. She is an artist on a mission, using her gifts and traumas to offer many pages of healing. For the reader, healing opportunities are abundant through offered blessings and, perhaps, through seeing familiar patterns and events from their own lives – a light shown on them to provide the context that may have alluded them, finally revealed to offer the beginnings of a path forward. Read these poems to discover a glimpse into your own pain. Read them for their glimpse of encouragement and support. Read them because maybe they’ll show you how art can make you whole. It’s certainly cheaper than therapy…and no doubt, more enjoyable too.

Rick Lupert,

Author of It’s Spritz O’Clock Somewhere and God Wrestler: a Poem for Every Torah Portion / www.RickLupert.com

About the Author

Lindsay Soberano Wilson is a mom, teacher, internationally published author, and creator of Put It To Rest, a mental health literary hub.

Her debut poetry collection Hoods of Motherhood: A Collection of Poems (Prolific Pulse Press, 2023) reflects on Soberano Wilson’s portrayal of becoming a mother. Her poem, from this collection, “The Japanese Red Maple” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and her work was recently nominated for the Best of the Net.

Born in Toronto, Canada, Lindsay is the granddaughter of Spanish Moroccan immigrants and Romanian Holocaust survivors. Her chapbook Casa de mi Corazon: A Travel Journal of Poetry and Memoir (Poetica Publishing, 2021) explores how her sense of community, Canadian Jewish identity, and home was shaped by travel.
Lindsay graduated with an Honours Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing and English from Concordia University and earned a Master of Arts degree in English and a Bachelor of Education from the University of Toronto.

Recent publications include Jewish Women of Words, Fine Lines Literary Journal, Fevers of the Mind, Avalanches in Poetry III: Poetry, Writings & Art Inspired by Leonard Cohen, Spillwords Press, Cadence, Prolific Pulsations and Proof of Life anthology in honour of 10-7.

In 2023, she earned a scholarship for teachers from the Canadian Society for Yad Vashem to The World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Israel. Lindsay is a member of the Feminist Caucus via The League of Canadian Poets where she and fellow poets amplify women’s voices. She is writing a memoir about being a third-generation Holocaust survivor.

Interviews for Lindsay Soberano Wilson

Lindsay Soberano Wilson is available for book signings and interviews by contacting:

lindsaysoberano@gmail.com

Book Announcements, Interviews, poetry, Poets & Events

Interview with Joni Karen Caggiano, Author of “One Petal at a Time.”

March 19, 2024March 19, 2024 Lisa Tomey-Zonneveld

Joni Karen Caggiano is an internationally published author, poet, and photographer. She was a 2022 Pushcart Nominee for her poem, “Old News is Not Old News,” published by The Short of It Publishing. She was privileged to write the Foreword for the Best Seller, I Am In Itself Poetry in the Dark, by the five-time Amazon Best Selling Author Michelle Ayon Navajas. On SpillWords Press NYC, Joni won Publication of the Month in November 2022 and Co-Winner of Socialite of the Year 2023 and 2024. Joni was a Co-Author of both #1 Amazon Bestselling books, Hidden In Childhood and Wounds I Healed. She is also in seven additional Poetry Anthologies. Her first book of poetry, Joni is also proud to be included in the poetry anthology, A Safe and Brave Space, published by Garden of Neuro Publishing (2024). She is currently a writer for Hotel Masticadores. Joni formerly contributed four combined pieces a month for one year to MasticadoresIndia and MasticadoresUSA. Joni is a retired nurse, ACOA (Adult Children of Alcoholics) survivor, and environmental advocate. Follow Joni: the-inner-child.com Twitter: @theinnerchild1 Instagram: @jonicaggiano Stay tuned for the upcoming link for One Petal at a Time.