Publisher's Synopsis
""What Is In the Blood" is a poetry memoir about growing up in rural Pennsylvania in the 1960s and '70s with a bipolar mother. The book's arc describes a girl's early childhood and adolescence - from having a vibrant mother who "gathered & herded us out into the black walnut air" to play an imaginary ball game "in the safety of her sphere" to "the ghost who was my mother drifting from bed to bed...layering herself under covers like a fallow field." "What Is In the Blood" is about being female in America, the expectations of caregiving, and the toll gender takes on women. Before she becomes ill, the mother's future is "steady as the laundry she sends out to the manure scented air." Her daughter warns, "My best advice / is learn to cook / That way you can feed / whoever wanders / into the kitchen." The book touches on a daughter's sexual awakening, as well as sexual assault and its lingering cost. "What Is In the Blood" makes clear the im
