Cover art by: Molly McIntyre

Praise for Blood Music:

In Emily Hockaday’s Blood Music, the speaker states “I have never known how to locate / or read the lifeline”—yet this beautifully braided collection is nothing if not an intricate study of lifelines. As the speaker’s pregnancy progresses, her child growing in “that unseen ocean,” she must also watch as ALS’ “indifferent tide erodes / the body of my father,” and addiction ravages her brother. The speaker is “cleft,” adrift in beginnings and endings, in the starkly gorgeous and the unspeakably tragic, in the struggle to accept what often feels unacceptable: “We all / have finite seasons, even Emily, even these fresh Spring blossoms.” The achievement of Blood Music is its celebration of those blossoms even though—or because—they cannot possibly last.

—Jessica Walsh, author of Book of Gods and Grudges

In these dead years, a new life tumbles inside me,” Emily Hockaday writes in her collection, Blood Music, poems that celebrate small beauties found despite the tumult of recent loss. These poems contain the miraculous, the hideous, the joyful, and the grotesque as she recounts her pregnancy while reflecting on both her brother’s drug addiction and her father’s physical decline and passing. Steeped in emotional upheaval, there are images of what has been ravaged and what is blooming: her brother’s skin, her father’s skeletal frame, the remains of a childhood treehouse, her unborn child swimming in the ocean of her body. In these poems, holding a life inside of you can be a way to move through grief. It can also be a reason to live. As she writes to her unborn daughter in her poem Aubade, “Fog can only hide us for so long. I carry you.

—Meghan Sterling, author of View from a Borrowed Field and Self-Portrait with Ghosts of the Diaspora

Emily Hockaday (she/her) is the author of Naming the Ghost (Cornerstone Press, 2022). She is also the author of five poetry chapbooks, most recently Beach Vocabulary (Red Bird Chaps, 2022). Her poems have appeared in print and online journals, as well as with the Poets of Queens and Parks & Points’ Wayfinding anthologies.