Blood Party - Softcover

"Merle Bachman's Blood Party is a remarkable memoir, told in fragments, interruptions-in ways that prohibit any fixed retelling. In it, the impossibility of telling becomes the story: of ancestry, family, and a mother's silence, pieced-together in a poetry that is always vibrating yet never arrives." -Kristin Prevallet"Memory has its own architecture, its own geography. Yet, as Merle Bachman demonstrates in Blood Party, these are mutable-stretching and contracting within the space of experience: strafing events to get at their illogic and yet/memory, remaking. Bachman's beautifully crafted, acutely sensitive poems adroitly combine history, autobiography, and lyric meditation. If space is 'the externalization of what you really are,' then Bachman risks sculpting space in a boldly disclosive and passionate way. This is a poetry that sends messages into the hidden sites of memory and returns with color, form, and commitment." -Elizabeth Robinson"Poetry as memoir, as autobiography, as family history: Merle Bachman's Blood Party is all this, but much more. The hybridity of Bachman's writing also produces a time warp, opens up a temporal portal through which we may pass into the heart of mid-20th century Jewish American culture, as it seeks to assure itself of its newfound and still inchoate position in the larger American landscape. Looking through the eyes of 'M,' Bachman's everygirl, we see the photos, the vignettes, the momentary gestures of a world constantly receding to an increasingly poignant horizon. Never sentimental, never anything but honest in its sympathy with the flawed, ordinary lives of succeeding generations (including her own), Blood Party is written in ways that swoop and hover, expand and contract with each emotional nuance." -Norman Finkelstein

Merle Lyn Bachman started out in Albany, NY, where she first discovered her affinity for languages and poetry. She is the grand-daughter of Yiddish-speaking immigrants who fled Poland and Russia and came to New York around 1912, where they tried (and failed) at chicken farming. A poet who delights in writing prose and exploring what seem to be the arbitrary boundaries between these genres, she has had work published in a number of journals. In 2000, Etherdome Press published her poetry chapbook, The Opposite of Vanishing. In 2008, Syracuse University Press published her book, Recovering 'Yiddishland': Threshold Moments in American Literature. A combination of literary criticism, translation, and memoir, it is also her dissertation for the Ph.D. in English, which she earned from the State University of New York at Albany. in 2010, Shearsman Books published her poetry collection, Diorama with Fleeing Figures.Bachman has lived in Massachusetts and, for many years, in Northern California (and therefore considers herself a "bicoastal" American). She now makes her home in Louisville, Kentucky, where she has taught writing to people forced to leave their homes: refugees from Bosnia, Sudan, Afghanistan, and other countries. She is currently a tenure-track assistant professor of English at Spalding University and directs its Bachelor of Fine Arts program in Creative Writing. In her writing, she continues to investigate her relationship to Yiddish and her Eastern European roots, and the question of what "home" means, particularly as a non-Zionist Jew.