The Self Is an Ocean (DarkWinter Press, 2026)

Cypher’s The Self Is an Ocean is a vulnerable, gut-wrenching, and heart-filling debut of a poetry collection. Having read some of Cypher’s work before reading this collection, I knew how honest and personal her writing is. Still, I was not prepared for how deep she brings us into her history—experiences both painful and joyous—and it was an honor to be invited there.

The Self Is an Ocean explores a range of topics: culture, womanhood, mental health, and identity, to name a few. The poems that explored family relationships/dynamics were the most visceral, poignant, and moving. There is a lot of focus on the body in the poems about the speaker’s mother, given the physical abuse (both direct and indirect) the speaker experiences. Cypher enhances this with detailed, textured imagery that puts the reader into her body:

“I kneeled before you, my knees
scraped against the chipped Indian floor.
You cornered me until my back pressed
so deep into the wall
that its pattern repeated
on my flesh, fear
stitched into the fabric of skin.”

– from “You Ruined My Homeland For Me”

I also love the shift of weight throughout the poem. It begins as the heaviness of trauma left behind by the mother’s abuse and the speaker’s experience within a cult. In “Creation,” the weight begins to shift into something that still knocks the speaker off kilter, but in a pleasant or satisfying way, as she discovers poetry. The weight of pain the speaker felt from her mother is outweighed by the love she feels for and from her Appa (father) and Thambi (younger brother). By the end of the collection, in “Weight of Life,” “weight” becomes the word for a life well-lived, as the speaker recites all the physical belongings (and the memories they carry) her future children might find once she’s gone.

Some of my favorite poems in the collection are (to name a few):

• “Examination,” which ends on a stunning image of the speaker imagining herself stretched and pinned “across a canvas for study” like a monarch on an entomologists’s board

• “To the White Woman Who Called Me Uncivilized for Eating with My Hands,” which reads like a love poem to the food in the speaker’s culture and just made me feel sorry for said white woman who will never know the joy of smelling “your childhood inside your palm” or feeling “oily syrup spill down you hand, and / [preserve] a memory within its stickiness.”

• “Appa is a Sunflower,” which makes me feel so happy for the speaker, knowing that she had this “miracle of nature / drawn on the canvas of man” in her life. A man Van Gogh would have loved to have painted “—golden and radiant.”

If you love memoirs and lyrically written poetry, I highly recommend The Self Is an Ocean, a collection that reminds us that our self is deeper than our surface would have others (or even ourselves) believe, that it carries ghosts and trauma we can never fully separate ourselves from, that the emotions and thoughts it experiences ebb and flow from good to bad and everything in between, and that it is vast and powerful and life giving and demands respect from others and itself.

Learn more about Cypher at cypherspace.ca .