Daughter of the Sun

Feminist poetry inspired by Medea

A collection of poems in two sections reimagining the Greek myth of Medea and personal sonnets exploring the author's time caring for her mother.

From the gentle rivers of Shropshire to the heat-baked seas of Greece, Daughter of the Sun radiates with mothers and tracks our orbits around them.

The book opens with a sonnet sequence on Spence's time reconnecting with her estranged mother, caring for her through illness and grieving her passing. In a hard-edged but tender story of a relationship under multiple strains, these frank and open poems explore the strange ways that suffering can heal old wounds and the cruelty of closeness magnifying loss.

The book shifts in its second half, retelling the story of Medea – the “barbarian” who murders her own children – with a reimagining of the ultimate “unmother”. Positioning her subject as part-myth, part-witch and part-quantum physicist, this narrative expands and contracts time, and burns with remembrance, inheritance and feminist defiance.

With the power and salve of the natural world always close by, Daughter of the Sun contends with our various unknowable mothers asking what we can understand of them and what we can take from the strength of their memory & myth.