Blood Party

Merle Bachman''s Blood Party is a remarkable memoir told in fragments interruptions-in ways that prohibit any fixed retelling. In it the impossibility of telling becomes the story: of ancestry family and a mother''s silence pieced-together in a poetry that is always vibrating yet never arrives. -Kristin PrevalletMemory has its own architecture its own geography. Yet as Merle Bachman demonstrates in Blood Party these are mutable-stretching and contracting within the space of experience: strafing events to get at their illogic and yet/memory remaking. Bachman''s beautifully crafted acutely sensitive poems adroitly combine history autobiography and lyric meditation. If space is ''the externalization of what you really are'' then Bachman risks sculpting space in a boldly disclosive and passionate way. This is a poetry that sends messages into the hidden sites of memory and returns with color form and commitment. -Elizabeth RobinsonPoetry as memoir as autobiography as family history: Merle Bachman''s Blood Party is all this but much more. The hybridity of Bachman''s writing also produces a time warp opens up a temporal portal through which we may pass into the heart of mid-20th century Jewish American culture as it seeks to assure itself of its newfound and still inchoate position in the larger American landscape. Looking through the eyes of ''M'' Bachman''s everygirl we see the photos the vignettes the momentary gestures of a world constantly receding to an increasingly poignant horizon. Never sentimental never anything but honest in its sympathy with the flawed ordinary lives of succeeding generations (including her own) Blood Party is written in ways that swoop and hover expand and contract with each emotional nuance. -Norman Finkelstein