About Blood Lines
Ann Bookman’s new collection, Blood Lines, is both a family history and an inquiry into genetics and our social environment, interrogating the tension between fate and randomness. The narrative element is captured in a series of prose poems about women in her maternal line who carry a genetic mutation associated with a highly elevated risk of breast and ovarian cancer (the BRCA gene). The point of departure is her struggle to embrace life fully while navigating a deep channel of uncertainty and anxiety. The boundary between the living and the dead is at times permeable: a combination of memory, conscious and unconscious, and inexplicable visitations. This volume uncovers the resilient strength of unseen connections and inheritance across five generations of Ashkenazi women.
About Ann Bookman
Ann Bookman is a poet, anthropologist and social justice advocate. Her poems have been published in Valparaiso Poetry Review, Soul-Lit: A Journal of Spiritual Poetry, Chronogram, and Dogwood: A Journal of Poetry and Prose, among others. In 2012, she published a chapbook, Point of Attachment, with Finishing Line Press. Blood Lines, published by Kelsay Books, is her first full collection. Her forty-year career in academia has been bookended by positions focused on women’s creativity, potential and power.
Early in her career she served as Associate Director of the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College working with an interdisciplinary group of women scholars, writers and artists. From 2013 through 2018, she was Director of the Center for Women in Politics and Public Policy at UMass Boston weaving an intersectional feminist perspective into her teaching and research. She is currently a Senior Fellow at the McCormack Graduate School of Policy and Global Studies at UMass Boston and serves on the Board of the Hudson Valley Writers Center.
To Purchase
Kelsay Books (February 26, 2022)
Blood Lines
Paperback, 114 pages