Childhood, in West Coast resident Sharon McCartney’s debut collection of poetry, is the memory of illness and death. Little prepares the reader for the narrator’s vitriolic images. Everything is underscored by the menace of cancer afflicting the narrator’s sister.

In “Niagara, 1968,” instead of enjoying this world wonder, the narrator’s mother has to deal with her sister’s seizures – “the usually sedate music of her body goes jangly, discordant, arms and legs arcing in the mist” – while passersby stop to watch the human spectacle. “I hate the scene we’ve become,” writes McCartney.

Some readers may find the litany of complaints surrounding illness bordering on the sacrilegious or obscene, but McCartney is able to pull it off by infusing a raw energy into her work. While adolescence is a universal time for rebellion, “I wear bikinis and smoke as much dope and whisper fuck you to my sister who is dying,” the poet pushes beyond convention.

McCartney tackles subjects including childbirth and doesn’t refrain from discussing bodily fluids: “from the years of shit and piss deep in the colonial sofa” to “blood clots staining the fragrant pads stuck between her thighs.” Scatology has its place in poetry and McCartney employs this risky technique judiciously. Her strongest poems, “Nickels in a Cup” and “El Camino Real,” a homage to her mother, are deeply felt and tinged with regret. She charts a bleak emotional landscape devoid of hallmark moments, and evokes profound melancholy for the two half-lived lives, “My sister drowning minutely in cancer and mucus, the years my mother kills as she pushes that wheelchair.”

Those seeking a panacea for their grief will probably not find it in Under the Abdominal Wall. But in this collection the narrator’s uncompromising honesty reveals the grim hold and toll illness and death have on the living.