Chapbook by C.M. Soto
The poems in Ice Scream Theater appear in the author’s poetry chapbook of previously published poems, These are the Rooms to My Mother’s House. This 113-page compilation has 47 photographs that compliment the poetry. Poems featured in the play:
- These are the Rooms to my Mother’s House
- Keeper of the Lops
- Storage
- Two
- Easy
These are the Rooms to My Mother’s House tells the story of one woman’s journey from a white-trash childhood with a drug addicted mother to becoming a mother herself, plagued by the self-doubt and self-destructive behavior. Some rooms are bedtime stories like Storage:
“When we were the children, the rooms were like gardens, and the weeding we did was done to belongings.”
Some rooms have humorous anecdotes on head lice and Acne in the Strangest Places. Others are scathing and even x-rated:
“I laid there in a biodegradable blanket and swore to eat and drink of sex no more. I strung my sweat like beads. Out stepped a child and umbilical cord.”
Rooms reveals the author’s bittersweet swim towards normalcy and self-confidence, all the while resonating in the style of shock poets, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton.
“The medics have plucked my insides of disease. Two–three times cancer hang, the stars of my show. My tumors in Coke bottles. My ovaries in a Vasoline jar. ”
Nursery rhyme themes play throughout with a sickening sing-song urgency in poems like Sorcerer’s Apprentice and Cinderella’s Bunions. Some poems ring of Galway Kinnel’s, Book of Nightmares with themes of parenthood, drug abuse, loneliness, and reproduction.
Previous Publications and Dedication
