The Sleeping Breast

A poetic essay on the female body and language in the tradition of Anne Carson, Maggie Nelson and Hélène Cixous

When poet Dolors Miquel is diagnosed with breast cancer, she does not write a memoir of illness in the conventional sense. Instead, The Sleeping Breast unfolds as a lyrical meditation on the breast as body, symbol, and site of power — where personal experience, cultural memory, and literary tradition converge.

Written in a highly poetic, associative prose, the book moves between the physical experience of disease and treatment and a broader reflection on how the female body has been represented, disciplined, eroticized, silenced, and mythologized across history, religion, art, and literature. The “sleeping breast” becomes a charged metaphor: a body part that pretends to be inert in order to survive, while remaining full of memory, vision, and meaning.

Interwoven with this meditation is a fragmented autobiographical narrative that recalls the author’s formative years within the poetic and artistic scene from the late 1970s onward — its performances, excesses, friendships, and collective energy. These memories are not nostalgic but analytical: they situate the author’s voice within a generational struggle for artistic and bodily freedom, especially as a woman in a literary world shaped by male authority.