Blood Moon

Why would I expect to feel blameless? Troubled and meditative, Blood Moon is an examination of racism, whiteness, and language within one womans life. In these poems, words are deeply powerful, even ifwith the onset of physical infirmitythey sometimes become unfixed and inaccessible, bringing together moral and mortal peril as Patricia Kirkpatricks speaker ages. From a child, vulnerable to words / we learned / outside and in school, / at home, on television: Some words you dont 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 its grammar. / The cop shot. The man was dead. And to a patient recovering from brain surgery: I dont 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 Kirkpatricks hands, the moon is confessor, guide, muse, mirror, andmost of allwitness, 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.