Blud

Poet and activist McKibbens (Into the Dark & Emptying Field), a slam poetry veteran, exorcises painful memories and traumas in her third collection. Declarative and direct, McKibbens confronts difficult experiences head-on: “Obedience in the wrong house is a kind of plague,// survivor’s guilt a sleight of hand.” The poems feature razor-sharp imagery, and McKibbens exhibits an ear attuned to sonic texture. For example, readers can hear the hiss in “Just electrified violence/ All fists, piss & safety pins, an unwed teenage mother with no address.” The most complicated and sinister poems in the collection involve McKibbens’s mother, who haunts the poet’s memory and makes her question her own role as a mother. She wonders what of her mother has she inherited and what can be physically expelled: “It would take a gun to birth her./ O bullet, O midwife!/ Draw the lunatic out,/ throw that voice/ slanted with madness into/ the cemetery air.” In her eerie, visionary poem “Dead Radio Apostle,” McKibbens expels her mother by giving birth to her: “She blinks me/ into focus & the room/ is bewitched,/ a museum of blood/ & silence.” Through all the violence in McKibbens’s work, there comes, if not hope, clarity of mind: “Loss is never/ just loss.// I want/ your blood/ to have/ sharpened/ from it.” (Oct.)