How Blood Works (Wick First Book) Paperback ? August 31, 2021

Winner of the 2020 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize

“A luminous debut collection of poems.”―Peg Boyers, author of To Forget Venice

“Moore explores the difficult territory of all that we cannot explain yet must embrace.”―Jim Daniels, author of The Middle Ages

How Blood Works is a collection of poems that considers the way memory, identity, and our very blood take shape in the places we inhabit: rooms, cities, landscapes, and the spaces within the body. Moore examines the idea of bloodlines―literal familial ties and the traumas, secrets, and complex relationships passed from one generation to the next. To explore these motifs, many of the poems borrow from the world of visual art, including painting, sculpture and its resonance with the creation of the self, and architecture, too, as a metaphorical counterweight to nature.

In keeping with the central theme that the stories we tell ourselves―and, by extension, our understanding of who we are―are shaped by the spaces in which we tell them, the poems in How Blood Works vary in form. From traditionally lineated lyrics to more architectural, segmented prose pieces, the poems themselves become a space for narratives of the self to play out.

Ellene Glenn Moore writes in several genres; her poetry, lyric nonfiction, and critical work have been published in Poet Lore, West Branch, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Best New Poets, Poetry Northwest, Brevity, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere. Her chapbook The Dark Edge of the Bluff was runner-up for The Hopper Prize for Young Poets.