Blood Song

by Michael Schmeltzer

"Blood Song" is the first full-length collection by poet Michael Schmeltzer.

Praise for Blood Song:

There is a radical nostalgia at the heart of "Blood Song," a nostalgia that recovers the wounds of experience and brings it to a rich, imaginative culmination. In this way, the book’s title is profoundly apt: on the one hand, Michael Schmeltzer’s poems are about blood and the tragic consciousness that is the result of our being in time; on the other hand, the poems are about song, the reconciling artfulness that is the source of the best poetry. As one of Schmeltzer’s canny speakers says, "I know / better. I’m no better." Equally unsettling and ravishing, "Blood Song" is a terrific debut. — Rick Barot author of "Chord"

Genres: Poetry

106 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2016

Reviews

[Kendra · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stunning. Each poem in this collection is a small and gorgeous devastation. I'm still reeling. I'm not sure I'll ever stop.

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

The poems in this collection show off Schmeltzer's tremendous gift of taking a single moment and distilling it from the few seconds that it lasts into the timeless echoes of memory and pain.

[Tabitha Blankenbiller · Rating 5 out of 5]

Haunting and all-encompassing, Schmeltzer's voice will be associated with 21st century poetry for years to come. This book is a fantastic introduction into his work.

[Jennifer · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very somber book as you might guess from the title. There were recurring themes of relationships with a mother and father, and their loss, as well as other forms of loss: loss of a child, loss by suicide, and just feeling lost. The language is beautiful throughout.

[Leslie Herbert · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have to read Michael's poems multiple times. The imagery is so thick and full that I can't process it all in one reading. His work illuminates moments in time, big moments, but distills them into the fragments of memory that hit you like bricks. It's like reading someone's dreams.

[Martina (sith acolyte) · Rating 4 out of 5]

“I contemplate the scar
immortalized in skin. I meditate
on the mother
throwing a glass that shatters
against her son’s forearm
and never stops breaking.”

[Julene · Rating 5 out of 5]

In his first full size book "Blood Song" Michael Schmeltzer writes poems about family, loss and growing up half Japanese. The poem that sits apart at the beginning before the two sections, "Phoenix-Tongue," asks, "How should families speak of/paper and people enduring the feral infernos?" A good heading poem for this book with so much: grief (from the poem "Because Your Father Died On Our Anniversary," "I remember how he slipped/into death like a man/plunging into a half-frozen lake."); blood (from the poem "The Memory of Glass," "And when I speak of fire,/I mean blood/rising out of wood, branches/that blanch the darkness"); and song with so much lyrical language, and a myriad of sounds: screams, cricket chirps, and from the poem "Instruments Only Heard At Night": sonatas, Ninth Symphony, a gong. The poem, "Elegy/Sound," is filled with harsh sounds: traffic, screeching breaks, horns. We hear and feel these sounds as we read these poems filled with the pain of loss, "I'd trade the sun/for one murmur of your mouth."

One of my favorite poems, "Kite," starts:
"The stripper grinds her ass
into the man's groin

like she's smothering a fire,
moans You're so hot, so

exotic, asks What race are you?
and he replies Seattle Marathon"

The poem's climatic middle:

"on that cliff a boy

dangerously close to tumbling over
and behind him his mother

jerks him back the way we pull
the string of a kite"

Another favorite poem, "Boil," starts:
"I know things. For instance,

when I talk to certain men
about how a hummingbird's tongue

laps up nectar, their eyes
donut-glaze, and they bore a hole

clean through to the core
of me, right where I hide

my secret-self like the pit

of a cherry. I'm not psychic,
but I know what they're thinking"

I've heard him read, and this book was a runner up for the Washington Book Award. I look forward to reading more of his writing.

[C · Rating 5 out of 5]

He may only have one chapbook and one full length collection under his belt, but these two have cemented Schmeltzer as one of my favorite poets.

I could go on and on about his staggeringly graceful sense of word play, his ability to make a small darkness mean so much, a small light so illuminating... I could. But all I really want to say is that I had goosebumps take hold over me on at least five occasions while reading this collection.

This is fantastic writing and I can't wait to read more from him.

Edit:
Read again in November of 2019: Book twelve of the 2019 reread project (so I am ever so slightly less behind on this project though with only two months left of the year I am only halfway done. I need more time to read these days…)

So it hasn’t been as long between reads for this one as it has for the rest of these books so far (so I didn’t expect major differences in how I felt about the book this time around.)

There were a few poems (Isaac Newton’s Teeth, Residue, and Tsunami in particular from the top of my head) that I had found a new respect/ love for, new pages to fold over and mark (yes, I am a terrible destroyer of books…) but for the most part I was drawn in by most of the same pieces (which, to be honest, is nearly every poem in this lovely collection.

His voice and tone remind me at times of Larry Levis or Fairchild (both of which I have as part of this reread project of mine so that should tell you how I feel about them…) but there is something distinctly “him” as well throughout all of these poems (I certainly don’t want to minimize him by only comparing him to others – just giving a bit of an entry point if you have read those poets.). It is just a somber, subtle, lovely collection. Threads of family, faith, addiction, love… All of the “big guns” of poetry but all are handled so well, all intersect and veer off in such wonderful ways.

I would absolutely rate this one just as high today as I did when I first read it (and how on earth has it already been three years since I first read it? that blows my mind as it feels like yesterday…) and I feel like he is one of the most gifted younger poets that I have read.

I cannot wait for more of his work to come out and I hope that he has another book on the way. He is one poet I would preorder new work from on day one.

[Eric · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Mesrobians Go Thrifting" and "Life Sentence" will kill you.