An inspired and engaging perspective of feminist art-making in a fractured world, Blood Feather reimagines resistance. With the help of three fictive narrators, an actress, a thinker, and a filmmaker create boundless opportunities for relatability. Caught up in a hurricane of identities, the actress wonders where the performance of character stops, saying, “rain has/a way of showing costumes for/what they really are”. The thinker, a so-called muse for her architect husband, searches for her self in a lyric embodying the molting process of a bird. This kind of evolution is central to all narratives, inspiring the reader to reflect on their own passages of growth. Taking its title from a vulnerable new feather of a bird that contains a constant flow of blood, Blood Feather reminds us of the essential yet fragile position of art. Protest and resistance can take that vital place of the blood inside of the feather in order to assert the importance of artful poetry such as this.

Karla Kelsey’s A Conjoined Book hinges together two texts—Aftermath and Become Tree, Become Bird—to create a meditation on the nature of aboutness. Aftermath unfolds after an unnamed ecological/emotional fracture, creating a landscape of rift where the “I” imagines herself as “she,” and perceptions weave into memory and fiction. Become Tree, Become Bird grafts the Brothers Grimm’s The Juniper Tree to the body of Aftermath, reworking what has splintered into a variation of fairy tale. Throughout A Conjoined Book, Kelsey’s condensed imagery, shifting viewpoints, and interwoven formal structures set lyric and narrative a-shimmer. Blending experiment and tradition, this book will appeal to a wide audience interested in seeing how fairy tale, philosophy, ecology, narratology, history. As Julie Carr writes: “horror, elegy, mystery, fairy tale, lyric, treatise, fragment meet one another with all their intensities of emotion and intellect.”