Cutting My Mother's Hair

Cutting My Mother's Hair is a contemporary, feminist engagement with Dante's Inferno.

It is also a portrait of society's lack of compassion for those who suffer from mental health issues. Taking as its inspiration this great Italian epic, Cutting My Mother's Hair depicts contemporary women in various stages of domestic hell and interrogates their familial and social inheritance of patriarchy. The last and fourth section of this book, 'The S Collection', creates a fictional story of two women caught in the rings of the Inferno, suffering breakdown, and for whom there is no compassion.

"In this uncompromising collection, Stephanie McKenzie guides us through an Inferno of female outcasts like a compassionate and committed Virgil. The encounter that she orchestrates between Dante, Newfoundland and Canada is provocative, illuminating and extremely powerful. The voices that address us along the way are dignified and unforgettable: there are no victims ('let everyone / on the ferry at Port-aux-Basques / know I've had seven good years'), but we are left with no doubt about who the real sinners are ('the government chews its way to graves'). We reach the depths of Hell but Paradise can be just round the corner ('Let them paint a boat. They can row out of hell')."
Maria Cristina Fumagalli

Stephanie McKenzie is a poet, editor and professor. She holds a PhD in English literature from the University of Toronto where she specialized in Aboriginal literature in Canada. She is co-editor of The Echoing Years: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry and Translation from Canada and Ireland (2007), co-editor and co-publisher of However Blow the Winds: An Anthology of Poetry and Song from Newfoundland & Labrador and Ireland (2004) and The Backyards of Heaven: Contemporary Poetry from Newfoundland and Labrador and Ireland (2003). Her second collection of poetry, Grace Must Wander, was published by Salmon in 2009.