blud
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4.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
"Throughout [BLUD], McKibbens breathes brilliant life into language, forging lush, rhythmic poems that are both fiercely urgent and tightly controlled, dark and flickering with fairy-tale-like magic. . . . Stunning, unflinching, fearless."―Booklist Starred Review
"Chicana poet, activist, and witchy folk hero of the disenfranchised. . . . [McKibbens] creates these spaces of witness with her feral and boundary-pushing poems that speak unflinchingly of topics often swept under the rug: rape, domestic violence, body shaming, mental illness, prejudice."—Ploughshares
"McKibbens, a pioneer in the art of performance poetry, presents her audience [with] selfless honesty."—The Rumpus
"Rachel McKibbens . . . reminds us why poetry as testimony is so necessary." —Poetry Foundation
McKibbens's blud is a collection of dark, rhythmic poems interested in the ways in which inherited things—bloodlines, mental illnesses, trauma—affect their inheritors. Reveling in form and sound, McKibbens's writing takes back control, undaunted by the idea of sinking its teeth into the ugliest moments of life, while still believing—and looking for—the good underneath all the bruising.
From "untitled (lost love)":
To my daughters I need to say:
Go with the one who loves you biblically.
The one whose love lifts its head to you
despite its broken neck. Whose body
bursts sixteen arms electric
to carry you, gentle the way
old grief is gentle.
Love the love that is messy
in all its too much . . .
Rachel McKibbens is a poet, activist, playwright, essayist, and two-time New York Foundation for the Arts poetry fellow. She is the author of four books and founder of The Pink Door, an annual writing retreat open exclusively to women of color. She lives in Rochester, New York.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Poet and activist McKibbens (Into the Dark & Emptying Field), a slam poetry veteran, exorcises painful memories and traumas in her third collection. Declarative and direct, McKibbens confronts difficult experiences head-on: "Obedience in the wrong house is a kind of plague,// survivor's guilt a sleight of hand." The poems feature razor-sharp imagery, and McKibbens exhibits an ear attuned to sonic texture. For example, readers can hear the hiss in "Just electrified violence/ All fists, piss & safety pins, an unwed teenage mother with no address." The most complicated and sinister poems in the collection involve McKibbens's mother, who haunts the poet's memory and makes her question her own role as a mother. She wonders what of her mother has she inherited and what can be physically expelled: "It would take a gun to birth her./ O bullet, O midwife!/ Draw the lunatic out,/ throw that voice/ slanted with madness into/ the cemetery air." In her eerie, visionary poem "Dead Radio Apostle," McKibbens expels her mother by giving birth to her: "She blinks me/ into focus & the room/ is bewitched,/ a museum of blood/ & silence." Through all the violence in McKibbens's work, there comes, if not hope, clarity of mind: "Loss is never/ just loss.// I want/ your blood/ to have/ sharpened/ from it."
