Blood Lines
Cover:
"April Contemplating May" by Kay WalkingStick
Ann Bookman’s new collection, Blood Lines, is both a family history and an inquiry into genetics and our social environment, interrogating the tension between fate and randomness. The narrative element is captured in a series of prose poems about women in her maternal line who carry a genetic mutation associated with a highly elevated risk of breast and ovarian cancer (the BRCA gene). The point of departure is her struggle to embrace life fully while navigating a deep channel of uncertainty and anxiety. The boundary between the living and the dead is at times permeable: a combination of memory, conscious and unconscious, and inexplicable visitations. This volume uncovers the resilient strength of unseen connections and inheritance across five generations of Ashkenazi women.
REVIEWS
"Risk cannot be unwound." These words, which appear early in Ann Bookman's powerful new mosaic-like memoir, Blood Lines, are a stark reminder. Comprised of poems, fragments of family history, photographs and rumination, Blood Lines unwinds the history of a family through which a harmful variant of the BRCA gene — a variant which significantly increases the risks of several cancers...read full review
David Orr
Los Angeles Review
Cancer: the word freezes the blood. Yes, many cancers, found early enough, are now a "chronic condition," yet to people like poet Ann Bookman, who lost all the women on her maternal side to cancer, it’s been a death sentence. For her, it’s in the blood. In this collection of poems, Bookman describes her lifelong relationship with the "Ashkenazi gene" of her ancestors, the BRCA mutation that predisposes an individual to a host of cancers, many of which can only be identified when it’s too late. The lyrical clarity of her language conceals a latent outrage, a mixture of grief and anger that persists throughout the book...read full review
Ann Leamon
Tupelo Quarterly
All personal narratives are perforated — full of facts but also fraught with gaps, unknowns, and secrets. Family histories are the hardest narratives to trace, and notoriously unreliable. Ann Bookman’s second collection of poems, Blood Lines, grapples with this combination of reality and mystery…read full review
Leigh Rastivo
The Arts Fuse
Bookman’s poems explode with emotion in unexpected outcomes. In “Rock, Paper, Scissors,” the last line punches readers in the gut, maybe in the same way this once-teenaged poet felt after her mother has explained her mastectomy: “I grabbed a scissors from my desk drawer/cut out their breasts, one by one/ page after page.” The words narrate the author’s anger expressed by violating other women’s forms…read full review
Elizabeth Reed
MicroLit Almanac
My recent interview with Elizabeth Reed, read full transcript here.
The book is a prolonged meditation about the members of her family; the texture of their vanished experience; her youthful alienation from a shared Jewish identity; and, subtly, the emotional charge that goes into the making of a poet. But now, as the characters materialize again center stage (in an uncommon gesture, the poet included a host of old family photographs interspersed with the text)…read full review
Steven Ratiner
Red Letter Poems Project
Ann Bookman’s first full-length poetry book, Blood Lines, chronicles the anthropologist author’s search to find meaning in over five generations of early deaths in her maternal line due to childbirth, or from ovarian and breast cancer; essentially, from the female condition itself. In detailing the tender with the tragic, Bookman deftly captures a complex ambivalence with these historical losses… read full review
Carrie Nassif
Colorado Review
These blood lines confirm [Bookman's] existence and our lives as readers. It's enough to bring me to tears.
Gail Hoskings
Main Street Rag
Advance Reviews
With good reason Ann Bookman’s Blood Lines opens in perplexity and grief. A number of women in her Ashkenazi Jewish family, including the poet’s mother, have died from breast or ovarian cancer. The poet herself and her own daughter have the BRCA gene mutation, giving both of them an elevated chance of developing such cancers. Often inspired by other women in her family, this poet refuses to let herself be defined by genetic fear and trembling. These poignant, finely crafted lyrics show us a poet navigating through waves of memory, anxiety, and loss, heading toward an affirmation of life in all its shimmering transience.
Fred Marchant, author of Said Not Said (Graywolf Press)
Blood Lines traces the inheritance of a brass menorah, art, and cancer. In this lyrical book of questions and wonder, Ann Bookman reveals a story of loss—vermillion wallet; heirloom ivory comb; mother. Here too, discovery—a healer father unable to save his wife; an adolescence of sadness and freedom; a wary, joyful parenthood; a generous love. With interstices of careful prose, there is a fullness of narrative in this satisfying and moving portrait of the first woman in at least four generations on her maternal grandmother’s side to enter her seventh decade.
Mary Buchinger, author of e i n f ü h l u n g/in feeling
(Main Street Rag)
“This powerful and poetic memoir offers insightful glimpses of human fragility and strength. Bookman’s own experiences with reproductive health – both personal and political – will resonate with so many readers.”
Judy Norsigian and Jane Pincus, co-authors and
co-founders of Our Bodies Ourselves
