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Winner of the Deep Line Poetry Series, snake breath traces a daughter’s journey through grief, inheritance, and transformation.
Mirroring the body of a snake, these poems move from head to tail, evoking the cycle of shedding and renewal and interrogating the loss of the poet’s father, a war veteran whose death fractures language, memory, and identity. Through elegies that recur like ritual, the poet returns to the moment of loss while grappling with anxiety, anger, and longing.
Rooted in Mexican American and South Texan landscapes, the poems braid English, Spanish, and Nahuatl with Catholic image, folklore, and borderland histories. Feminine figureheads like La Llorona, the Virgin Mary, Coyolxauhqui, and the snake become vessels for exploring daughterhood, sexuality, and the body as both sacred and haunted. Domestic spaces, kitchens, and family rituals hold tenderness alongside intergenerational trauma.
In her debut collection, Bianca Alyssa Pérez confronts inherited silences and reclaims voice through mythmaking and embodiment. Desire, shame, and devotion collide, revealing a self that is constantly in flux. snake breath offers a vision of survival where grief becomes a site of transformation and the act of shedding as a necessary form of becoming.
“In snake breath, a daughter mourns a difficult father and honors the legacies of Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldúa, and the powerful women in her own family. These are poems of radiance and radical transformation, haunted by ghosts recent and ancestral and grounded in the ‘dry bark splits under a Texan sun,’ where a woman can be a snake then ‘glorified guilt hanging from a tree’ and then a god. Here is a poet of grand and resplendent feeling, one who dares to enrapt readers in the sensualities of domestic life despite—or, perhaps, because of—the dailyness of grief. snake breath is beautiful because it is fearless and it is a tender majesty because it reaches out to us all.” —Jennifer Chang, Deep Line 2025 Editor-at-Large, author of An Authentic Life
Bianca Alyssa Pérez is a poet & educator born and raised in South Texas. Her chapbook, Gemini Gospel, was the winner of Host Publication's Chapbook Contest in Spring 2023. Her work is in or forthcoming from these beautiful places: Porter House Review, The Bangalore Review, Infrarrealista Review, New York Quarterly, Poetry Daily, Praisesong for the People Anthology (edited by Amanda Johnston), The Texas Observer, The Baltimore Review, and an anthology from The University of Nevada Press. She is also the co-host of the horror podcast, Basement Girls, with writer, Steph Grossman. Find more chisme at her website: biancaalyssaperez.com
An Ode to Those Who Are No Longer Daughter
I. The Head
First Elegy: On Missing
What I Will Not Tell My Grandmother
Hereditary
I Came from a Ribcage, First
The Story My Sister Told Me in A Whisper
Salve
Corona de Cristo
Silent Praxis
A Recipe for Lineage
Gemini Gospel
In a Dream
Rio Grande Veteran’s Cemetery on Inspiration
Cenote
II. The Mouth
Second Elegy: On Missing
Arrullo de La Llorona
Blessed Be the One Who Cries Wax
Waiting for the Rumble of a Border Crashing Down
Litany for the Wet
El Mal Querer
Raw
Moon Speak
You, Without You
Ars Cenetica (The Art of a Meal)
Somewhere in Texas, Love Is Easy
Terlingua, Texas
What it means to dream about a spider
III. The Heart
Third Elegy: On Missing
I am; La Doña
Snake Skin
As A Lover, I’m
Small Fire
The First Her
On Sundays, I Eat a God Whole
El Fantasma Del Viento
On Breaking: A Ghazal Broken
Here’s a Memory
I Am My Own Haunting
Family Tree
IV. The Tail
Fourth Elegy: On Missing
My Dad Waters the Yard Every Morning Before I Wake
My Mother Whispers, Doesn’t He Look So Peaceful?
Una Pala Dorada
A Part of You
There Is Light
Antes
DisEmbody
Cuerpo
Daughter Gospel
List of Things I Wish I Had In My Kitchen
Tethering to Earth, My Mother
Shedding
Grief Logic
exorcism of girlhood
Notes