snake breath

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.

Praise for snake breath

“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 

“In snake breath, Bianca Alyssa Pérez dwells in the aftermath of death, where the ‘sky rains seeds back into these wounds.’ The loss of a father spurs grief that’s three-dimensional. Pérez acknowledges and reckons with sorrow, abuse, regret, and guilt. Grief doesn’t absolve but clarifies the past, the present. Pérez is just as attentive to craft. There’s an instructive tension between the line and the sentence, and her imagery is precise and poignant. Bianca Alyssa Pérez has written an elegiac and riveting debut.” —Eduardo C. Corral, author of Guillotine

“snake breath travels the sinuous path of girlhood. Ancestors, myth, and sensuality accompany the speaker through spaces both domestic and dangerous, mundane and mythical, where the need to love, lament, and understand keeps hurting, helping, and unmaking her. And yet, the speaker tells us, there is power in undoing: ‘Pérez women have always been beautiful / in their act of taking apart something to make / a new thing.’ Presided over by goddesses both personal and mythological, the beautiful poems in snake breath fearlessly bear witness to the grief and awakening that come with leaving girlhood for a new place of power, desire, and light.”  —Cecily Parks, author of The Seeds

“snake breath is a ritual in poems. It conjures a spiritual realm where loved ones gather with the living through this masterful poet's offering of melodic language and deep homage for our elders and ancestors. Through memory and prayer, Bianca Alyssa Pérez weaves a collection of elegy and reverence for all that is familial and sacred.” —Amanda Johnston, 61st Texas Poet Laureate