Gloved Against Blood

by Cindy Veach, January Gill O'Neil (Foreword by)

Overview

This collection explores the fraught relationships of four generations of women against a backdrop of the patriarchal textile mills of 19th century Lowell, Massachusetts. It speaks to family, infidelities, abandonment and the close work, women’s work of mending what is torn, making it like new despite the forces of inherited histories.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781933880648
Publisher:	CavanKerry Press
Publication date:	11/07/2017
Pages:	92
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Cindy Veach is the author of Gloved Against Blood and the chapbook Innocents. Her poems have appeared in the Academy of American Poets, AGNI, Michigan Quarterly Review, Sugar House Review, The Journal, Salamander, Nimrod International Journal, Solstice Literary Magazine, and Poet Lore, among others.

Table of Contents

Foreword xiii

Community

How It Resists 3

Earthlings 4

Great Red Wall 6

Theft 7

Drawn 8

How a Community of Women 9

Thimbleful 10

Coming to Massachusetts 11

Notions 12

Triptych: Travaux d'Aiguille 14

My Mother Is Forgetting 17

Blood From My Finger

This Threshold He Did Not Carry Her Across 21

Thirteen Hours of Labor Daily 22

After the First Week 24

Regulations to Be Observed by All 25

Curating My Grandfather 26

Sewing Lessons 28

Dear Francis Cabot Lowell 29

Lowell Cloth Narratives 30

Absent 33

Field Trip: Boott Cotton Mills 35

Like Her 37

The Other Woman 39

Breakfast on the Lanai with My Mother 40

Now I Must Forget

December Selves 43

Accent 45

French Seams 46

Math Lessons 48

My Mother Tells Me Stories 49

On the Grain 51

Ordinary Art 53

Predators 54

If I Forgive You 57

Just in Time 59

Notes 61

Acknowledgments 63

Editorial Reviews

For me, Gloved Against Blood holds the perfect image for these beautiful poems that struggle to push away received histories. From the immigrant mill girls in 19th-century Lowell, Massachusetts, to contemporary café workers who sell espresso / fifteen ways, we need to protect ourselves against hard times—against the firm eye of the needle—against forces we cannot control no matter how hard we work to sew or mend. This is an extremely fine and forceful debut.”—Susan Rich, Author of Cloud Pharmacy


“For its hardness, for how it resists / splintering,” Gloved Against Blood, by Cindy Veach, with its meditations on the lives and hardships of female textile workers, demands the reader’s steady hand and unflinching gaze through braided images, sometimes lacy with memory, sometimes sharp as a needle. Loom-like, the poet’s forms use the under-over of the sentences in such a way as to bring out a cadence gold-threaded with sound—“the way a daughter // walks, a grandson shrugs— / pure plagiarism, memory muscle // turning backward forward, / not ours not theirs.” Here, the poet investigates faith—in husbands, in the company, in God—but does not arrive at easy conclusions; instead, she turns up more questions and, perhaps more importantly, the silences of those who cannot reply. Ultimately, this collection reminds us that the lives of women are not delicate, domestic trifles; it witnesses to their unyielding survival, asking us to look upon their narratives, “the spiraled remnants of their making.”—Emilia Phillips, author of Groundspeed

From the Publisher