Bloodroot

Each poem in Carmel Morses debut collection Bloodroot opens fully in the sun of memory. And just like the plant from which the book takes its name each poem blooms with paradox: delicate and enduring; simply designed yet emotionally complex. Even though ghosts of grandmothers mothers wives daughters aunts and sisters travel through dreams and darkness when the flowers close and even though I am a woman in an inkwell drowning / because she did not answer me Bloodroot pulls down strength from the sun and sinks it into its juiced-red roots. Morse doesnt obscure the shimmering details of pain but names and wonders and challenges. In doing so this sharp poet transforms memories of abuse and regret into art.-- Christine Stewart-Nuñez South Dakota Poet Laureate and author of Bluewords Greening (Terrapin Books 2016)In Bloodroot Carmel Morses poems capture the experiences and the people that have shaped her life. The poems are made of concrete words and images. They also have a deeper level that captures the emotional and spiritual depth at the root of the experiences. The first poem Onyx is charged with striking images and it tells a story. The father rejects his child because it is a girl; however he gives the narrator a beautiful necklace. Sixteen years later when she prepares to deliver her second child the father cannot accept that the baby is a girl. He leaves no gift and two years later he leaves for good. The narrators life is so hard she almost sells the necklace but she cannot. In order to remain strong she would unwrap the necklace/from the tissue paper/and fondle the stone. Here is Eliots Objective Correlative written with striking force forging the experience in the readers mind. - Gary Pacernick author of Memory and Fire: Ten American Jewish Poets (Peter Lang 1989)Bloodroot an apt title for this collection delves deep through family and personal history to explore what is has meant and continues to mean to be an independent woman in America even though jagged threads shriveled/into cables of dried blood/and snapped off at the roots years ago. Carmel Morses poems seek out staples that attempt/to gather my...loose ends and in so doing she provides a full pantry. She exposes how American culture has held women to a tent/of beauty as surface perfection delving beneath that surface to find both flaws and inner beauty. Ultimately this collection pays tribute to the human capacity despite torment and tragedy to survive and to nourish its bloodline and dance the Charleston at a granddaughters birthday party. - Will Wells author of Unsettled Accounts (Ohio University Press 2010)