Advance Praise for How Blood Works
From the Foreword:
“As with several of the accomplished and worthy manuscripts I pored over as judge for this esteemed contest, How Blood Works also stood out for its deft language, expertly rendered imagery, and sonic quality, among other mastered principles of craft which one would expect to encounter in the polished work of a poet as seasoned as Ellene Glenn Moore. However, what clearly set Moore’s winning manuscript apart from the other contenders came to bear on a single word: trope—that often elusive yet essential quality of a collection that forms its elemental arc, a metaphorical spine that holds it together, and elevates a work, transforming it into something transcendent. More specifically, as the book’s title submits, the central trope of bloodline, which courses explicitly and implicitly throughout these pages, is masterfully employed by Moore to thread these poems together, not solely into a great book of poetry, but also a powerful one that feels as alive as her heartbeats in harmony with with our own.”
— Contest Judge Richard Blanco, Presidential Inaugural Poet and author of How to Love a Country
“These remarkable poems have an integrity of substance grounded in precise detail; each word in each line deserves careful scrutiny. Moore explores the difficult territory of all that we cannot explain yet must embrace, how the disconnected send off sparks, connect, and erupt into flame. She creates imagery so intense and magnified that it’s almost surreal, distorted by memory. She notices everything, and that meticulous noticing unearths startling insights, one after the other. She earns her way. She speaks only when she has to, and when she speaks, we are compelled to listen.”
— Jim Daniels, author of Gun/Shy
“In How Blood Works, Ellene Glenn Moore’s various yet unified collection of poems, nothing less than the reliability of language is at stake. In poem after urgent poem memory tests itself against the possibilities of description and its likely distortions by perspective, color, accident and design. In Rashomon fashion, the speaker examines incident and narrative from different angles, trying to get to the bottom of something essential, but elusive, about the past—her own and what she can put together about her parents’ past from the fragmented remains of spoken accounts and blurry hindsight. Like a scientist, she dissects experience, isolates what is static from what is dynamic in the properties of her materials much in the way one of her heroes, Josef Albers, encouraged his students to do. Then she reconstitutes the elements into stories which have the power of legend whose source is in some way the body ‘but more alive than my body […] seething itself into metaphor.’ In Moore’s richly lyric language these forces acquire meaning and weight—a burdensome human weight she would, paradoxically, be rid of if she could. ‘The forest does not understand our stories,’ she writes in one of her several homages to Albers. Finding herself under a copse of sap-bleeding dragon trees, she envies their mute reach toward ‘desire, longing for a body of their own.’ Tirelessly, the speaker searches the natural world in vain, reaching for a language beyond language that is pure and free of the human baggage of memory, seeking that ‘bitter grammar’ with which to ‘move under limbs that undulate with oceanic aspirations.’ In the end she arrives at a place of equilibrium in the present where she experiences a kind of ‘deliverance’ from the agony of her quest, emerging with an understanding that language and its myriad applications are in fact, deeply hers. Like the kite she let slip from her hand as a child, the haunting past has grown smaller and smaller until it has ‘disappeared inside’ her, only to emerge from that dark place incarnate in this luminous debut collection of poems.”
— Peg Boyers, author of To Forget Venice