Review: Dear Boobs by Cassie Burkhardt
By Tyler List
Cassie Burkhardt’s collection, Dear Boobs (Bottlecap Press, 2025), is a linked collection of well-crafted poems that deal with motherhood and a longing for love. Despite its comical title, Burkhardt’s poems take the reader into the life of a mother trying to get through the day while simultaneously raising her children and maintaining her own sense of self. The tone of many of these swings from chaotic, poetic maximalism to peaceful wisdom, mimicking the rhythms of the speaker’s domestic life. We learn from the poems that Burkhardt is the mother of three kids with her husband, a brain surgeon, and that she’s worried about becoming invisible.
Each poem deals with its own individual, episodic-like story, jumping between images of the speaker herself, her husband, or her kids—Burkhardt’s good at showcasing a feeling of daily life passing by, as she also wrestles with self-doubt, the joy of motherhood, and the excitement of circus school—a hobby she has picked up to reclaim some sense of herself as an individual. Burkhardt’s skill is in knitting together the various styles that arise from describing these activities. She comes across as a disheveled, excitable, bold person—a full human being!—as she addresses what it means to be a mother (and more).
The first poem in the collection, aptly titled “Dear Boobs,” has Burkhardt creating a dialogue between the speaker and her own breasts, which have seemingly vanished after childbirth. Burkhardt capitalizes “Boobs” as though they were a person, and she includes text-message language, so we see this poem as a casual exchange between old friends that have not seen each other in a while:
Hi, I’m just waiting here in the parking lot,
not sure if you tried to call? I stopped breastfeeding a while ago,
but you didn’t show, just left me these two
soggy teabags in my bra. U comin’ back?
We’ll go on ahead. Me, my three kids, my flat chest,
an afternoon of nothingness tethered to a tire.
How many times can a body inflate and deflate
before it’s rendered invisible?
The poem—irreverent and hilarious, but also melancholic—suggests a desire for the past, and the speaker fantasizes about her own past as a teenager in an attempt to remember what having fuller breasts felt like. Burkhardt (maybe we should continue to say “speaker,” but the poems are certainly autobiographical) explores discontent with her body after having her third kid, questioning if what she has lost is worth what she has gained. This speaker is worried about losing her grip completely, but the vividness of the poetry itself suggests that she is a person who should be looked at, considered, listened to. Notice her blend of offhand, conversational tone with the lyrical “nothingness tethered to a tire.” Deep insight can flash quickly, even when we’re cleaning up spilled applesauce, and the movement in the language shows a life that’s fighting to reinflate.
Despite this poem’s somber tone, some of the pieces in Burkhardt’s collection also have a more uplifting vibe to them, showcasing the speaker’s resolve; she doesn’t want to forsake what she and her family have grown into. A poem that does this very well is “Spin the Bottle,” which details the speaker playing the classic teenage make-out game . . . only, sweetly, with her children:
my four-year-old
kissed the six-year-old and the six-year-old
kissed the nine-year-old and no one wiped
their kisses or missed a turn and even
the nine-year-old, my son, my first born
who seems to recede farther and farther away
from me every day jumped up to kiss me,
a meaningful peck of one second
that caught me by surprise.
This image is a shining example of Burkhardt’s ability to create a scene in your head that defines the word “peaceful,” hard-won peace, possibly frantic peace. Through the accumulating list of each of the speaker’s kids, the poem builds and gives us different kinds of joy—in one long sentence here. It’s both sweet and sweetness-receding, and Burkhardt is a master of noticing that blend.
The last five lines of the poem round out the scene with a feeling of warm normalcy, as we return to the life that the speaker has while holding onto the memory of how she and her kids had just played: “he stood up, said, Ok that’s it, I don’t want / to play anymore and I nodded, the TV went on, / they hit the couch and I picked up the green bottle, / hugged it to my body and set it on the counter / next to the microwave as they all yelled, Popcorn!”
The simple joy of motherhood, as Burkhardt writes, is to have love to spread amongst those closest to you, and this scene shows that even the simplest gesture of a game of spin-the-bottle can hold a great deal of meaning to someone. Here, it’s innocence and a recognition that those moments of little-childhood might be about to transform for the nine-year-old. The speaker cherishes and grieves.
“The Doe” is yet another standout in this collection that meditates on an earlier time slipping away. In this poem, the speaker starts by exclaiming that “They killed off the doe. About time. / Yet it’s strange to look out my window / and not see her munching.” This poem, ostensibly about the death of a deer, creates a very clear metaphor that allows us to consider this creature and the speaker together:
She had no respect
for the neighborhood, trash-talked her mate,
she wanted too much, selfish doe.
Now the hillside is empty,
but at least no one will slam into her with their Land Rover.
The doe, in this instance, can be seen as a parallel for the speaker herself; these aspects of the doe’s life—and Burkhardt’s—can also be seen in previous poems throughout the collection, especially in regards to the speaker’s husband, who shares a complicated relationship with the speaker in the poems that they coexisted within.
At first, the poem seems to be condemning the presence of the doe (some self-loathing?), however later lines suggest that the doe is actually a symbol of motherhood. The poem also asks us to consider the legacy that a mother leaves behind for her family: “A flick of her head said, when was the last time you / admired the gemlike radiance of a chipmunk, / praised all things wild and small? Breathe in nature’s / heavenly masterpiece, she said. Listen to me– / long after I’m gone.” From this ending, the reader can come to understand the doe’s, and perhaps a mother’s, message: that we should treasure the things around us, no matter how small (or vanishing) or simple they seem.
In this poem, Burkhardt at first notices the differences between herself and this powerful deer. The comparison is painful. The doe, now deceased, was “not at all confused about her place / in the order of things, white tail turned-up, speckled offspring in tow.” And yet Burkhardt notices something else that makes her like this possibly bedraggled but outwardly striving deer. “Kicking up dead leaves, she crunched out a beautiful song.”
As Cassie Burkhardt rakes through the daily life of her own household, she too kicks up those leaves. She may be confused, but like her natural counterpart, she’s making the art of resilience.
New Ohio Review 