About this item
Highlights
- All the Blood Involved in Love is an urgent and evocative collection-featuring complex and compelling poems about the choices we make surrounding home, freedom, healing, partnership, and family.
- About the Author: Maya Marshall is a writer and an editor.
- 80 Pages
- Poetry, American
Description
About the Book
All the Blood Involved in Love enters the world as the US continues its dramatic fights over reproductive rights.
Book Synopsis
All the Blood Involved in Love is an urgent and evocative collection-featuring complex and compelling poems about the choices we make surrounding home, freedom, healing, partnership, and family. In a moment of critical struggle for reproductive justice, Maya Marshall's haunting debut meditates on womanhood--with and without motherhood. Traversing familial mythography with an unflinching seriousness, Marshall moves deftly between contemporary politics, the stakes of race and interracial partnership, and the monetary, mental, and physical costs of adopting or birthing a Black child.
Review Quotes
"Confounded, mesmerized and enraged, women gaze long at their mothers. They rejoice and recoil at the possibility of sons and the sudden inevitable disappearing of sons. Craving just one unconquered root, they collect and shed lovers, some who are quivering mirrors, some edges that might be blades. Fathers boom tenet from every crevice. Never quite pinpointing the source of pain, women clutch tight their own bodies to hold in the hurricane. This work-penned as backslap for the black woman intending to stomp into, through and beyond the existence she is laughingly "allowed"--harbors the hurricane's unrepentant muscle. Enter and risk. Enter and live."
--Patricia Smith, author of Incendiary Art "All the Blood Involved in Love is at once the most Southern, most feminist, and Blackest book I have ever read. Maya Marshall witnesses the way we used that word in the old church, through a language so polished and exact that we feel cleansed by it as readers. This is a beautiful debut from a game-changing poet."
--Jericho Brown, author of The Tradition
"All the Blood Involved in Love is a lyrical work of psychological and temporal complexity gripped by questions of freedom, trauma, desire, imagination, and possibilities of Black girlhood and womanhood in the U.S. It is at once sensuous and terrifying, taut and lush, as in: 'Do these trees know? / Do these trees know the grazing hem, the line / between sweet heat and deep sweat? // The woman('s) sex. Her hanging. They must. / Her hair is made of them.' I'm saying, this stunningly shiftful, strange, and exact book interrogates the histories with which our blood and time are written. It insists that there is power in such scrutiny. I'm saying, her Eye's on this: 'To save my life, I undress this disarray.'"
--Aracelis Girmay, author of the black maria
--Evie Shockley, author of semiautomatic "Intimate and understated in unflinching private, public mourning, All the Blood Involved in Love courses with an undeniable steady intensity throbbing at its tender jugular. Delivered with unnerving focus-- almost unbearable--declarative observations, we don't just read Maya Marshall's poems, we breathe with them, and bleed with them: Tenderness is the impulse to protect /what you know you could destroy. /This is the gift of my father's neck. This is a harrowing and illuminating book surging with intelligence and pulsing with new music. Maya Marshall writes with life force."
--Robyn Schiff, author of Revolver
About the Author
Maya Marshall is a writer and an editor. Author of the chapbook, Secondhand (Dancing Girl Press, 2016), she is also co-founder of underbellymag.com, the journal on the practical magic of poetic revision. Marshall has earned fellowships from MacDowell, Vermont Studio Center, Callaloo, Cave Canem, and the Community of Writers. She works as a manuscript editor for Haymarket Books and has served as a senior editor for [PANK]. Her writing has appeared in or is forthcoming in Best New Poets 2019 (University of Virginia Press), RHINO, Potomac Review, Blackbird, the Volta, and elsewhere.