Blood Memory

A poetry collection.

Blood Memory, Neile Graham's third book of poetry, is a cycle of dramatic monologues and lyrics that celebrates women's stories. Many of these poems imagine women from the past: a tinker, a crofter, a Viking wife. Other poems recount contemporary tales: a woman on her deathbed assessing her life, a middle-aged woman hungry for youth, a young woman just testing the world. These voices create a composite portrait of how the stories we tell about the natural and human world affect our lives and our perceptions of ourselves; they show us what we have in common and what divides us from ourselves, those we love, those we hate. Blood Memory reveals an ancient, ageless psyche discovering herself, exploring the world, and learning to meet that world part way, envisioning how landscape, folklore, circumstance, and memory shape what it means to be human.