Bloodline (The Hollyridge Press Chapbook Series)

In Bloodline, Adrian Blevins deepens her exploration into those areas which have always been the focus of her poetry: babies, mortality and an anxious kind of mother love. But she does not stop there. Blevins settles her unflinching gaze on new subjects ranging from Greek myth to political poetry, revealing a catalogue of losses in language that is by turns, celebratory, edgy, stylized, sad, and sassy. The poems riff on the irreconcilable differences between the speaker's love for her children and the worried, death-obsessed uproar that love can't help but bring. With restless energy, the poems delve into the disjunctions and gaps between a life imagined and the one accepted. Blevins fearlessly wades into those sacrosanct regions declaring, "I'm not saying this was my incarceration / because I was too devoted" even as the poems map a landscape of grief for a life arrested by the speaker's procreative powers.