Blood Moon

by Patricia Kirkpatrick

Overview

“Why would I expect to feel blameless?”

Troubled and meditative, Blood Moon is an examination of racism, whiteness, and language within one woman’s life. In these poems, words are deeply powerful, even if—with the onset of physical infirmity—they sometimes become unfixed and inaccessible, bringing together moral and mortal peril as Patricia Kirkpatrick’s speaker ages. From a child, vulnerable to “words / we learned / outside and in school, / at home, on television”: “Some words you don’t say / but you know.” To a citizen, reckoning with contemporary police brutality: “Some days need a subject and an action / or a state of being because it’s grammar. / The cop shot. The man was dead.” And to a patient recovering from brain surgery: “I don’t have names. / Words are not with me.”

Throughout the collection, the moon plays companion to this speaker, as it moves through its own phases, disappearing behind one poem before appearing fully in the next. In Kirkpatrick’s hands, the moon is confessor, guide, muse, mirror, and—most of all—witness, to the cruelty that humans inflict upon one another. “The moon,” she reminds us, “will be there.”

Compassionate, contemplative, occasionally wonderstruck, Blood Moon is a moving work of moral introspection.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781571314987
Publisher:	Milkweed Editions
Publication date:	04/14/2020
Pages:	72
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Patricia Kirkpatrick is the author of Odessa, awarded the first Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry and the 2013 Minnesota Book Award. She also has published Century’s Road, poetry chapbooks, and picture books. Her poems have appeared in such journals as Prairie Schooner, Poetry, and the Threepenny Review, and in many anthologies. Her awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Jerome Foundation, the McKnight Foundation, the Loft Literary Center, and the Minnesota State Arts Board. She has taught writing at many colleges, most recently in the Universityof Minnesota MFA program. She lives in Saint Paul.

Read an Excerpt

THE BORDER

The world will soon break up into small colonies of the saved.
—Robert Bly, “Those Being Eaten by America”

They begin taking children from their parents.
We already know the story it’s like.

You know the one. When there isn’t enough food or safety a brother and sister get sent to the woods. A swamp, the desert . . .

They might have stones or crumbs in their pockets.
Sometimes they get bread. Sometimes milk or berries.

The border marks a line the way a strike of lightning misses one house,
burns down the next.

For some children there’s nothing but ashes and scraps.
That’s how much the border matters

when you reach the makeshift tables,
when you’re questioned in a language you don’t understand,
when a witch squeezing a small finger figures out how to profit.

Terror begins with the jangle of keys and belts.
Then the children go in cages.

UNREQUITED

For a time the moon disappears and a letter he says will come by mail doesn’t come.

At the café I take a small table.
The barista is pointing out pastries—
apricot, buttercream, plum—
and kinds of tea,

green that’s fired quickly, black allowed to wither.
Pu’er must be brewed without bitterness.

Keep talking I told myself for weeks after surgery.

Keep walking backward
while you put this deck of cards in order
the therapist told me.
Not so bad she said to her colleague.
Not so much drop foot.

Diamond, heart—desire begins with a name.
Gabardine, susurrus—
the wool of his suit touching my face.

Stay I said.

The moon tonight will be thin and pale, a tisane with nothing but herbs and dried flowers that steeps while I wait.

TETRAD

Blood Moon for Nor Hall

The moon held an aura before turning red,
silence like a tremor just before the baby emerges.

The other side of the moon stays hidden.

Call the baby they’d said when the baby didn’t come.
Sometimes that helps.

In labor the current ran all the way through her. To deliver the child,
its cup being poured.

Ancient. Witnessed. Said to bring gifts.

Is the baby all right? the mother is asking.
Yes a nurse answers she’s perfect.

 

Table of Contents

Contents

I
Traveler
Recess
Marbles, 1957
Learning to Read, 1963
The Flower That Doesn’t Come Back
Arriving in Baltimore
Baltimore, 2015
Fear Rattles a Silver Bell
The Moon, a Cento, a Cloak of Patches
What Was Coming
Patriarch
New Roof
The Border
Lion

II
The School Bus
Lessons
Ghosts
Song on the Island
A Sort of Fair Wonder and Stillness
Goat
The Hard Part
The Grasses

III
Coyote
Tetrad
*Blood Moon
*New Moon, Make Believe
*Blue Moon
*The Goneness
Then Came a Departure
Small Hut of Flowers
Unrequited
Next Morning
Confession
In the NICU
Baby Days
Oboe Notes
The Photograph of Emily Dickinson
Poem Without a Subject

Acknowledgments

Editorial Reviews

"Patricia Kirkpatrick's splendid new book, Blood Moon, carries us away to so many places and helps us 'see farther' indeed, even asking our most present questions. What comes next? Who knows what?" —Naomi Shihab Nye, New York Times Magazine

"These poems are quiet, awash in subtlety and beauty. At the same time, they tackle injustice, racism, immigration, and the vulnerability of children. Days after reading Blood Moon my thoughts return to the coyote whose 'rash fur' the narrator kept seeking after it was gone. In that line, and throughout Blood Moon, Patricia Kirkpatrick shares moments of recognition that haunt and resonate. Consume this book slowly and savor it." —Frances Phillips

"The stark, looking-back poems in this collection show painfully how an earlier era—subject to status quo preferences and complacency—foreshadows our own era of discord and uncertainty. These poems realize with great poignancy how threads in the earlier veil were already beginning to fray. This is a book about many realities, but its widest reach is to register the contrast between what we were taught when young, and what we somehow knew all along." —Maurice Manning

"Few books of contemporary poetry have both the passion and the precision of Patricia Kirkpatrick's Blood Moon. I'm in awe of Kirkpatrick's ability to reconcile conviction with openness. Her poems counter the injustices of our time not with rhetoric but with abiding curiosity, cunning resourcefulness. Asking herself and her reader, 'how do you know, how do you / ever know,' Kirkpatrick returns us to the particularity of words themselves—of syllables even. While examining the duplicities of language, the barbed difficulties, the histories of hurt, Kirkpatrick at the same time renews that language. Poems such as 'Learning to Read, 1963,' 'Lessons,' 'Oboe Notes,' and 'Poem with a Subject' restore my faith in the art of poetry. This is a vital collection from a poet with a tremendous gift." —Peter Campion

"In Blood Moon, Patricia Kirkpatrick gives us a Baltimore childhood of unremarked racial events recaptured in adulthood for their larger meaning. She observes the unholy partnership of denials that paradoxically acknowledge the presence of racism. When the poet reflects on the presence of the moon, it is as easily a nod to the privilege and costs of whiteness in adulthood as to witness: 'It is almost not here / Like a watch with a black face / You dropped down the well of your childhood.' Blood Moon evokes the connection and influence of the moon's tides, from the border to the Philippines to the intimacy and fogginess of recovery from brain surgery, wondering at the birth of a new generation." —Mary Moore Easter

Praise for Odessa

“Impeccably crafted poems that warrant reading and rereading . . . Reading Odessa calls to mind Audre Lorde’s ‘Poems Are Not Luxuries,’ an essay that examines how self-scrutiny feeds the imagination and the work of poetry. . . . Though written in a different time and context, Lorde’s understanding of what good poems can and should do applies precisely to what Kirkpatrick achieves—fearless poems that have been written out of necessity and that are thus vitally important.”—The Rumpus

“Among the many talents that contemporary American poetry offers, Odessa shines a fierce white light. This book provides a fusion of unsentimental, realist fidelity to the subject and intense, metaphorical imagination. The speaker of these poems tells the story of her suffering from a brain tumor, and her survival, with a precise and steely focus. At the same time, she leads the reader into a landscape that’s both identifiable as the contemporary Midwest and also enchanting, ghostly—the terrain of a lucid dream. The emotional power of Kirkpatrick’s poetic narrative corresponds here with her mastery of craft. In nervy sentences and phrases, in sinuous and firm lines, all of which show the imprint of deeply lived experience, this poet proves Robert Frost’s claim, ‘No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.’ I am convinced that Odessa will move its readers for many, many years to come.”—Peter Campion

“One of the speakers in these compelling poems declares, ‘I am writing to say I have been opened and closed.’ That is the truth of this book, its small map and enormous journey. With those and other simple words we are led—powerfully—into the difficult but calm reverie of discovery no matter the condition or circumstance of the treasure. As the poems show, we make this sojourn together even as the details make news of us all.”—Alberto Ríos

“The nearness of grief and illness haunt the deep currents of this book to the extent that the present moment cannot be verified. The world is familiar and strange at the same time. If what once was known appears to return, it comes back changed. Thus the consciousness of this grave book must be finely calibrated—and it is. The reader is brought into the presence of a mind learning itself for the second time. Most of us only experience such wonder once. I am moved and lifted by these stark poems.”—Maurice Manning

“An astonishing achievement. Like Tomas Tranströmer, Kirkpatrick understands what is rational but false; what is irrational but true. Supremely lyrical, brilliantly imagined—this is poetry of the highest order. In these pages, ‘Beauty and suffering / keep making the world.’”—Connie Wanek

“As you read them, the poems in Odessa ache in your hands. They will ache in your mind and memory, too, for a long while after you close the book. They ache with the inescapable beauty of landscapes that remind us of human loneliness—you can hear the grasslands sighing in these pages, hear birds great and tiny calling to each other as they try to find their way home. And they ache with longing for a self strong enough to survive the physical and psychic wounds that have confined it to rooms where flowers cannot grow and the wind cannot scour the soul clean of pain. This is a remarkably honest and deeply loving collection of poems. I haven’t read anything quite so moving in a very long time.”—Eleanor Lerman

Praise for Century’s Road

“The voice in these poems is too troubling to be called meditative (unless meditative means to be reconciled with trouble), yet too compassionate and deeply patient to be called troubled (unless we mean unseated by beauty or bewildered by transience and eternity). These poems own all of these characteristics. I’m sure they will find space in many hearts.”—Li-Young Lee

“Earthy, intensely womanly, these poems vividly portray birth, family issues, and postulate a threnody of sorrow. The language is powerful.”—Maxine Kumin

“Kirkpatrick’s poems bring a deep inquiry to her experience and a rich and expansive imagination into the world of the senses and things. They range through many aspects of human life, probing old age and midlife as well as pre-birth, raising questions of presence as well as absence. I find myself taken by their unsentimental tenderness—a mark, I believe, of all good lyric poetry.”—Jane Hirshfield

“Century’s Road is a beautiful and generous book. Here is the world as we need it to be in poems: full of large, unavoidable terrors and the seemingly small but necessary moments of joy that allow these poems to become acts of love. Kirkpatrick’s poems give us the world as it truly is.”—Jim Moore

From the Publisher