Blood Song, Paperback/Michael Schmeltzer

Descriere

Blood Song is the first full-length collection by poet Michael Schmeltzer. Praise for Blood Song: There is a radical nostalgia at the heart of Blood Song, a nostalgia that recovers the wounds of experience and brings it to a rich, imaginative culmination. In this way, the book's title is profoundly apt: on the one hand, Michael Schmeltzer's poems are about blood and the tragic consciousness that is the result of our being in time; on the other hand, the poems are about song, the reconciling artfulness that is the source of the best poetry. As one of Schmeltzer's canny speakers says, "I know / better. I'm no better." Equally unsettling and ravishing, Blood Song is a terrific debut. - Rick Barot author of Chord In Michael Schmeltzer's Blood Song we are confronted with the thrumming and violent fact of the body's music. From the haunting image of a father's wounded stomach, the metamorphosis of hornets into syringes, and the consolation passed to a grieving parent, we emerge from the book able to name our ghosts. Schmeltzer's poems are haunting love songs sung to children before sleep in the face of all the world's calamities. Poem after poem of this startling debut is filled with a tenderness capable of turning us to tinder.- Oliver de la Paz author of Post Subject: A Fable Blood Song is a perfect title for Michael Schmeltzer's powerful first book. Blood spills out of a man's slashed belly "like an open cocoon." Blood ties family together, for good or ill. "If you turn tragedy into story / you can survive it" sounds like a prayer, but the tongue can't be trusted, words slip from one to another: "scream" to "squirm," "insect" to "inflict," "hear and know" to "here and now." Familiar consolations fail: "How swiftly music / turns to stench; the things we cherish / how quickly they fly out of reach." And: "Not every movement is dance, / not everything swallowed sustenance." Images of salvation quickly become something else-a child freed from a closet's darkness sees "the