Description

Poetry by Julia Bouwsma.
Winner of the 2015 Cider Press Review Book Award.

ISBN: 9781930781238
Release date January 1, 2017

Advance praise for Work by Bloodlight:

“What an earthy song, these poems! They rise up from the dark earth, the images quirked and turned to serve a raw transformative vision in this twenty-first century book of seeing with your eyes open.  This book will be useful for visionaries, taxidermists, and all those who look for the exact knowledge of the sacred in profane earthy humanness.”
—Joy Harjo, poet, musician, performer, teacher

“The elegiac is a most tender and yet most rigorous accounting. Every detail of its fact and decorum must register upon flesh, upon the syllables of flesh. In Work By Bloodlight, Bouwsma unfailingly discovers the higher registers and the keenest syllables. They beautifully prove to be a “wingspan against snow.”
—Donald Revell, author of A Thief of Strings, Pennyweight Windows: New & Selected Poems, and My Mojave

Enjoy a sample, previously published in Cider Press Review, Volume 17, Issue 3:

Foxes and Hens

The hens shrill us awake to the bullet dawn. Only animals move quickly

in such primordial light. My husband makes coffee with my rifle in his hand.

He goes to work, leaves it on the kitchen table for me to see. Some days our hilltop

is a balding arc of granite, something a girl could hatch right out of. The fox,

exquisite and brazen, takes two in the broad day. I’m a lousy shot.

The fox kills more than she can carry. My husband ties two dead birds to a stake

and waits. For a week, the hens summer-swell. I walk a wide circle around them

as I do my chores. The fox does not return. On Sunday, he drives their bodies

down the road and throws them to the trees.

About the Author

Julia Bouwsma lives off-the-grid in the mountains of western Maine, where she is a poet, homesteader, editor, teacher, small-town librarian and Maine’s sixth Poet Laureate (2021-2026). Bouwsma is the author of two poetry collections, Midden (Fordham University Press, 2018) and Work by Bloodlight (Cider Press Review, 2017), both of which received the Maine Literary Award for Poetry Book. Other honors include the Poet’s Out Loud Prize (2016-17), the Cider Press Review Book Award (2015), and residency fellowships from the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Vermont Studio Center, Monson Arts (Monson, ME), and Annex Arts (Castine, ME). Bouwsma’s poems and book reviews can be found in Cutthroat, Green Mountains Review, Poetry Daily, Poetry Northwest, RHINO, River Styx, and other journals. She currently serves as the Library Director for Webster Library in Kingfield, ME and teaches in the Creative Writing department at the University of Maine at Farmington.