Blood Memory, Colleen J. McElroy's collection of narrative poetry, emerges from deep seated memories with enormous emotion. Through the rhythms and musicality unique to McElroy's voice, it portrays an extended family, a complex culture spanning several decades, multiple victories and failures, and a single brilliant soul that frames the poems.  Dedicated to McElroy's mother, the book is universal in its scope, inescapable in its earthy particularity.  McElroy writes, “I am the last female of a family/ of women who wove the fabric/ of stories into doilies and slip covers…/" Blood Memory offers consummate storytelling and unforgettable poetry capturing a place and time gone forever. And as an evolving history, the poetry has a cinematic quality, large and intimate and at the same time, characters utterly vivid.

The poems in Here I Throw Down My Heart prompt readers to see beyond the surface of images, whether that surface is a uniform, a prescribed setting, a familiar geography, or the surface that evokes the most social commentary, skin—the body itself. The modern world moves at a greater speed than the world of a few generations ago, so we look for ways to sort our likes and dislikes, to set our comfort zones. These poems say: “don’t believe everything you see, look again.” The poems look at how borders between countries, or between genders and class have deepened the lines between the haves and have-nots. While everyone is on a collision course for lack of food and water, those dividing lines seem more impenetrable than ever, underscoring the disparity between gender, race, and class.

PEN Oakland National Literary Award, 2008

Colleen J. McElroy's poetry shoots for the moon, and takes it in, too, in one way after another. The collection’s award-winning poems animate women’s experiences of sex, shopping, and dancing, while offering telling insight into the struggles and silver lining of lust, love, illness, and aging. Rich with vivid imagery and candid storytelling, Sleeping with the Moon takes readers on moonlit adventures under the night sky, through the barroom’s smoky haze, and under the covers.

...Beware: such delicate

sights have driven more than one woman to despair

instead she watched him breathe-- relishing

for a moment that secret space where night

grows soft and the moon’s detumescence forgives--

and where if this jeweled light holds they might

strip themselves of years if only for one night

--from “In Praise of Older Women”