Synopses & Reviews
“Katie Fords is a finely-wrought lyrical beauty, a poetry of detail and care, but she has set it within an epic arc.” —PoetryI lie still, play dead, am delivered decree:
our daughter weighs seven hundred dimes,
paperclips, teaspoons of sugar,
this child of grams
for which the good nurse
laid out her studies
as a coin purse
into which our tiny wealth clinked,
our daughter spilling almost
to the floor.
—from “Of a Child Early Born”
In Katie Fords third collection, she sets her music into lyrics wrung from the worlds dangers. Blood Lyrics is a mothers song, one seared with the knowledge that her country wages long, aching wars in which not all lives are equal. There is beauty imparted, too, but it arrives at a cost: “Dont say its the beautiful / I praise,” Ford writes. “I praise the human, / gutted and rising.”
Review
Praise for Katie Ford
“Katie Ford has emerged as one of the most recognizably thoughtful poets of her talented generation. Manifesting a rigorous aesthetic combining allusiveness with inwardness, her poems mark the multivalent ways by which the moral conscience registers dailiness with history (also myth) and how consciousness itself perceives the relationship of the small to the overwhelming, the weak to the deadly, the remote to the pressing moment, the insignificant to the topical.” —David Rigsbee, The Cortland Review
About the Author
Katie Ford is the author of two previous poetry collections, Colosseum and Deposition. She has received a Lannan Literary Fellowship and the Larry Levis Reading Award. She lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and teaches at Franklin & Marshall College.