Blood Party by Merle Bachman

"Merle Bachman's BLOOD PARTY is a remarkable memoir, told in fragments, interruptions—in ways that prohibit any fixed retelling. In it, the impossibility of telling becomes the story: of ancestry, family, and a mother's silence, pieced-together in a poetry that is always vibrating yet never arrives."—Kristin Prevallet "Memory has its own architecture, its own geography. Yet, as Merle Bachman demonstrates in BLOOD PARTY, these are mutable—stretching and contracting within the space of experience: strafing events to get at their illogic and yet/memory, remaking. Bachman's beautifully crafted, acutely sensitive poems adroitly combine history, autobiography, and lyric meditation. If space is 'the externalization of what you really are,' then Bachman risks sculpting space in a boldly disclosive and passionate way. This is a poetry that sends messages into the hidden sites of memory and returns with color, form, and commitment."—Elizabeth Robinson "Poetry as memoir, as autobiography, as fam