Virtual Launch Event Blood Moon By Patricia Kirkpatrick In conversation with Sally Wingert and Elena Cisneros
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BOOK DESCRIPTION:
Troubled and meditative, Blood Moon is an examination of racism, whiteness, and language within one woman’s life. In these poems, words are deeply powerful, even if—with the onset of physical infirmity—they sometimes become unfixed and inaccessible, bringing together moral and mortal peril as Patricia Kirkpatrick’s speaker ages. From a child, vulnerable to “words / we learned / outside and in school, / at home, on television”: “Some words you don’t say / but you know.” To a citizen, reckoning with contemporary police brutality: “Some days need a subject an an action / or a state of being because it’s grammar. / The cop shot. The man was dead.” And to a patient recovering from brain surgery: “I don’t have names. / Words are not with me.”
Throughout the collection, the moon plays companion to this speaker, as it moves through its own phases, disappearing behind one poem before appearing fully in the next. In Kirkpatrick’s hands, the moon is confessor, guide, muse, mirror, and—most of all—witness, to the cruelty that humans inflict upon one another. “The moon,” she reminds us, “will be there.”
Compassionate, contemplative, occasionally wonderstruck, Blood Moon is a moving work of moral introspection.
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About The Author
Patricia Kirkpatrick is the author of Blood Moon as well as Odessa, which was awarded the first Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry and the 2013 Minnesota Book Award. An editor and teacher, she has taught writing in many colleges and community settings, most recently the University of Minnesota MFA program. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Prairie Schooner, the New York Times, and elsewhere. In 2020 she wrote the script, read by Sally Wingert, for the VocalEssence concert “Rightfully Hers” chronicling women’s suffrage.*
In conversation with Sally Wingert and Elena Cisneros
Sally Wingert is celebrating her 38th year as a professional actor based in the Twin Cities. She has worked around the country in such theaters as ART in Boston, Yale Rep, MaCarter Theater, Asolo Rep and many others but the Twin Cities is home. With over 90 productions at the Guthrie Theater, many with Theater Latte Da, Ten Thousand Things, Mixed Blood, Minnesota Jewish Theater and many others, Sally feels this is the most extraordinary place to be an artist.
Elena Cisneros is a poet living on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Her book In the Shadow Country (2019) was published through Tavern Books’ Worlstad Contemporary Poetry series. She received her BA and MFA from Hamline University in Saint Paul, MN. She is the author of The Sad True Tales of J. Strait: In Which There Is Contemplation (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2012) as well as Dark Stars w/ artist Susan Solomon (Red Bird Chapbooks 2014). Her poetry has appeared in the Saint Paul Almanac, Sleet Magazine, Red Bird Broadsides, Coffee House Press Coffee Sleeves Project and the Minnesota Book Arts Winter Book Lessons For our Time (2012). She also was a finalist for the Loft Mentor Series in Poetry and Creative Prose in the 2016-2017 year.
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