How does Ostriker use allusion in the poetry collection, Mastectomy?

Ostriker’s allusion to the myth of the Greek goddess Persephone ties into her themes in the poem of innocence and death. Persephone was abducted by Hades and brought to the underworld. The pomegranate seeds that she was forced to eat become a symbol of the speaker’s cancer cells. Like Persephone, she was an innocent who should have beaten the one-in-four odds that she had cancer. In that sense she was “abducted” by fate. Her discovery of the cancer threatens to make her the “queen of death” as well. The two are also linked by the image of barrenness.