Blood Flower

In Blood Flower, passionate imagery married to music bursts from each line pushing out the boundaries of Uschuk’s earlier poems. It continues themes in Uschuk’s American Book Award winner, Crazy Love. The poems braid the startling, sometimes brutal stories of her Russian/Czech immigrant family during the McCarthy Era in a conservative Michigan farming community with stories of courageous individuals, especially women, who persevere to love, despite it all. Uschuk’s step-grandfather, father, brother, nephews, and first husband all suffered severe PTSD as combat veterans who returned home from wars that ravished not only their lives, but the lives of the women and children closest to them. This is the history not just of one family but of immigrants in this nation. These poems, although set in landscapes across the globe, commonly draw their imagery and healing from the natural world, the wild world, and the integrity of the human heart.

Pamela Uschuk is a professor of creative writing at Fort Lewis College, the editor in chief of the literary magazine Cutthroat: A Journal of the Arts, and the author of four volumes of poetry, including Crazy Love, the award-winning Finding Peaches in the Desert, and the Pulitzer Prize–nominated Scattered Risks. She lives in Durango, Colorado.