Love & Other Cancers

The poems in Love & Other Cancers are deeply personal yet universally resonant, deftly exploring the struggles of our life journeys as we discover ourselves and navigate familial, friendly, and romantic relationships through seasons of illness, loss, and change.

Love & Other Cancers stretches the mind’s eye with a language of deep attention and meticulous, hopeful curiosity. Here are poems of stillness and longing, of piecing things together, of tricks of the light. Language becomes a way of seeing what is around us, but at the same time draws attention to all that cannot be seen, to what is hidden, knotted, out of reach. Pain slips in but doesn’t disturb or demand. It is part of a delicate whole in which everything has its own makeshift - yet vivid - awareness. There is beautiful sense of acceptance in this pamphlet for all that there is, felt deeply, witnessed tenderly. The precariousness of bodies, the ever dancing presence of the past, humour in the mundane, and ultimately, love. – Tessa Berring

This terrific debut pamphlet is many things: deft, lyrical, assured, formally playful. A tender, healing work, Thomakos takes us inside womanhood, family, diagnoses and treatments with detail and precision, and she makes us feel every word. – Jane McKie

Love & Other Cancers offers musicality and excitement throughout ... Thomakos’ writing feels conversational and confessional but also controlled and measured. There is a lightness to it and yet nothing feels written simply for the sake of it. An assured debut. – Sean Wai Keung