Allison Bothley

"You do not claim goodness. You claim endurance."

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Practice for Drowning is a meditation on endurance: what we stay for, what we accept, and the stories we tell ourselves to survive.

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Across poems of eros, memory, motherhood, marriage, and myth, a woman moves through the selves she has inhabited and the selves she has had to leave behind. These poems give language to what women are often taught to minimize: anger, ache, desire, ambivalence, and the complicated act of staying. They move between devotion and reckoning, between what we keep quiet and what refuses to stay quiet anyway.

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At its heart, Practice for Drowning is about the practiced art of staying afloat, and what happens when a woman stops treading water long enough to ask what she has been swimming toward all along.

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Haunted, intimate, and unflinching, this debut collection is for readers of contemporary feminist and confessional prose poetry.

 

About the author​

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Allison Bothley is a writer based in Ontario, Canada, and the creator of Bangs Zine. Her work has appeared in The Globe and Mail, Red Rock Review, Pinch, Literary Review of Canada, and elsewhere. She is the winner of the 2026 Lesley Strutt Poetry Contest. Practice for Drowning is her debut chapbook. Find her on Instagram @allisonbothleywrites.​

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