Dear Boobs, by Cassie Burkhardt

Poetry, chapbook, 48 pages, from Bottlecap Features. Dear Boobs is a vivid, unflinching exploration of modern womanhood told through the lens of motherhood, marriage, identity, and aging. In this poignant and often hilarious collection of prose poems and poetic monologues, Cassie Burkhardt captures the raw, everyday complexities of a woman raising children while trying not to lose sight of herself. Issues like postpartum body image, domestic invisibility, longing, intimacy, and suburban isolation are laid bare with striking vulnerability and wit. Set in places as ordinary as the coffee shop, a suburban kitchen and a cluttered minivan, to more lyrical spaces like aerial silks class and the imagined land of liquid memory, the poems offer glimpses into the emotional undercurrents of a life filled with beauty, absurdity, and heartbreak. Burkhardt’s voice is compassionate and incisive, offering readers a mirror through which to examine their own joys, losses, and evolution. Whether contemplating her changing body, her brain-surgeon husband, or her daughter’s muddy face, Burkhardt gives language to the liminal, often overlooked moments of womanhood—those suspended between rage and love, fatigue and freedom, identity and dissolution—and in doing so, reminds us what it means to remain fully, vulnerably alive. Cassie is a poet and freelance writer based in Philadelphia where she lives with her husband and three children.