Blood Alluvium is a séance in free verse, lighting candles off the tension between Duncan's Ashkenazi Jewish and Appalachian-Gael heritage, measuring breath by the fragile stillness between trauma and music. It is a cartography of grieving charted as a process of transmutation. It struggles with identity, God (and goddesses), and the police. Through moments of incantatory transcendence and the rushed wallowing of modernity, this collection consults the ancients, brushes up against nondualism, invokes the faded tartan of mythology, and ultimately makes a decision.
Decidedly Southern, lyric, and ritualistic, Blood Alluvium reaches for the universal, sheltering a sense of interconnectedness within the hooded growl of individuality, and harmony between apparently incompatible polarities.
The collection features 45 poems reflecting moments of creation, death, and the flood of all which comes in between.
