"Cultural brujeria, sacrilegious litanies, ritualized births, and letters from hearts and/or brains populate Rachel McKibben's world in blud"--

"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.

Dawson's darkly tempting debut drops her unsuspecting heroine into a strange faraway land for a romantic adventure that's part paranormal, part steampunk . . . and completely irresistible. Original.

Winner, 2020 Miller Williams Poetry Prize Winner, 2020-2021 Northeastern Minnesota Book Award In this long poem—almost a novel-in-verse—Jayson Iwen examines the intimate thoughts and feelings of two would-be poets: Roze Mertha, a teenage girl growing up in a trailer park, and William Blud, a veteran navigating age and loneliness in an apartment he shares with an Afghan refugee. Deftly crafting distinct voices for these characters in the upper midwestern terrain they inhabit, Iwen explores the quiet heartbreak and tenderly treasured experiences of two apparently unremarkable people using poetry to understand a world that doesn’t make much space for them.

Born from the ashes of the most fierce and powerful entity in all of Trivaesia, Darla was sent to grow up in the outside world with no knowledge of where she came from. When she finds herself wielding new power, she must decide which part of her will rule her heart---the evil from which she was born or the good by which she was raised.

"In a book-length series of persona poems, Jayson Iwen examines the intimate thoughts and feelings of Americans whose lives have been predominantly ignored by contemporary mainstream culture. Through the eyes of a teenage girl growing up in a trailer park and a retired veteran sharing an apartment with an Afghan refugee, Iwen reveals the everyday heartbreak and beauty experienced by people living at the periphery of the nation's consciousness. Roze and Blud is gritty, gut-wrenching, gorgeous, and ultimately transcendent. It is a Spoon River Anthology for the 21st Century, a Waste Land for the heartland. Roze and Blud is a virtuoso performance, the kind of book that fundamentally transforms the way you see the world after you have experienced it... because you don't read it, you experience it. In addition to winning the Miller Williams Poetry Prize, Roze and Blud was a finalist for the National Poetry Series and the Green Rose Prize, as well as a semi-finalist for the Wheeler Prize and the Brittingham and Felix Pollak Prizes"--

Frontcover -- Contents -- Acknowledgements -- Abbreviations -- Introduction: Words and Other Fragments -- 1 Speaking Up and Shutting Up: Expression and Suppression in the Old English Mary of Egypt and Ancrene Wisse -- 2 What Comes Unnaturally: Unspeakable Acts -- 3 Crying Wolf: Gender and Exile in Bisclavret and Wulf and Eadwacer -- 4 Taking the Words Out of Her Mouth: Glossing Glossectomy in Tales of Philomela -- Conclusion: After Words -- Bibliography -- Index