My debut full-length collection of poetry, Shared Blood, is now available from Gnashing Teeth Publishing.
To order, go to the publisher website here. Also available on Bookshop.org.
If you would like a signed copy, please contact me directly via email.
DESCRIPTION
Shared Blood centers on the author’s fascination with and ultimate estrangement from his own father as he becomes a father himself. It navigates this space through surreal renderings of lived experience, fabulist narrative, and sometimes litanies of pure language. The author’s concerns with this book include fatherhood but also the idea of manhood in relation to being a parent, the generational effects of these forces, and the desire to overcome these forces in sometimes baffling ways. Ultimately, the reader will be led to question the use of the word “Dad,” especially if their relationship with their father is complicated.
To order, go to the publisher website here. Also available on Bookshop.org.
If you would like a signed copy, please contact me directly via email.
DESCRIPTION
Shared Blood centers on the author’s fascination with and ultimate estrangement from his own father as he becomes a father himself. It navigates this space through surreal renderings of lived experience, fabulist narrative, and sometimes litanies of pure language. The author’s concerns with this book include fatherhood but also the idea of manhood in relation to being a parent, the generational effects of these forces, and the desire to overcome these forces in sometimes baffling ways. Ultimately, the reader will be led to question the use of the word “Dad,” especially if their relationship with their father is complicated.
Praise for Shared Blood
“Reading Luke Wortley is like staring into an M.C. Escher drawing, trying to figure out the origins, finding stairways as layers and echoes of what is absent. In Wortley’s work, it is vital to understand how we rise up and build from loss, longing, and memory. This is a stunning, necessary collection. Bravo and welcome to this exciting prose poet.”
Jose Hernandez Diaz, author of The Fire Eater and Bad Mexican, Bad American
When I think of the prose poem, I think of a sacred space in which the real and the surreal can safely cohabitate, where strangeness can unfurl through small snippets of life like a red carpet. Luke Wortley’s Shared Blood is a gorgeous and imaginative exemplar of how the prose poem can help us process difficult realities. The speaker of these poems moves seamlessly between reality and dreamscape, between the pain of being an estranged son and the anxiety of navigating new fatherhood. In order to break the cycle of trauma, to disinherit a legacy of lovelessness, the speaker searches frantically for a way to stop “slow-playing [his] own life.” In this collection, Wortley steps through the portal of the prose poem again and again, ready to face the unknown that awaits on the other side.
Taylor Byas, author of Bloodwarm and I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times
Shared Blood, the transfused and transforming new book by Luke Wortley, might just be William Wordsworth’s and Russell Edson’s sage and sanguine, Romantic and Expressionistic love child. The prose poems, a whole brooding passel of children being fathers to men, are engorged with gorgeous grotesqueries and all the tense tenses of time being too much with us. They whisper and whistle, sing and scat hemostatic hymns that suture and staunch the ruptured bleeding heartbreaks of all those hearts leaping to all those tympanic and tragic ups, all those known unknowns now known.
Michael Martone, author of Plain Air: Sketches from Winesburg, Indiana and The Complete Writings of Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, Edited by Michael Martone
Luke Wortley's Shared Blood is a cohesive and connected collection of prose poems that see-saw between becoming a father while dealing with an estranged father of your own. Blending dream logic with the achingly real, Shared Blood presents Midwestern family life with a surrealist tilt of reality where everything is slightly sideways. In a world where staircases are made of hands and milk pours out of eyes, this is a book of lips and teeth and bones and bourbon. Ghosts and confessions and love and grief. Gutting, heart-wrenching paragraphs packed with absence. A city in a stomach, a sunflower sprouting out of a phone.
Ben Niesposziany, author of No Farther than the End of the Street
Jose Hernandez Diaz, author of The Fire Eater and Bad Mexican, Bad American
When I think of the prose poem, I think of a sacred space in which the real and the surreal can safely cohabitate, where strangeness can unfurl through small snippets of life like a red carpet. Luke Wortley’s Shared Blood is a gorgeous and imaginative exemplar of how the prose poem can help us process difficult realities. The speaker of these poems moves seamlessly between reality and dreamscape, between the pain of being an estranged son and the anxiety of navigating new fatherhood. In order to break the cycle of trauma, to disinherit a legacy of lovelessness, the speaker searches frantically for a way to stop “slow-playing [his] own life.” In this collection, Wortley steps through the portal of the prose poem again and again, ready to face the unknown that awaits on the other side.
Taylor Byas, author of Bloodwarm and I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times
Shared Blood, the transfused and transforming new book by Luke Wortley, might just be William Wordsworth’s and Russell Edson’s sage and sanguine, Romantic and Expressionistic love child. The prose poems, a whole brooding passel of children being fathers to men, are engorged with gorgeous grotesqueries and all the tense tenses of time being too much with us. They whisper and whistle, sing and scat hemostatic hymns that suture and staunch the ruptured bleeding heartbreaks of all those hearts leaping to all those tympanic and tragic ups, all those known unknowns now known.
Michael Martone, author of Plain Air: Sketches from Winesburg, Indiana and The Complete Writings of Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, Edited by Michael Martone
Luke Wortley's Shared Blood is a cohesive and connected collection of prose poems that see-saw between becoming a father while dealing with an estranged father of your own. Blending dream logic with the achingly real, Shared Blood presents Midwestern family life with a surrealist tilt of reality where everything is slightly sideways. In a world where staircases are made of hands and milk pours out of eyes, this is a book of lips and teeth and bones and bourbon. Ghosts and confessions and love and grief. Gutting, heart-wrenching paragraphs packed with absence. A city in a stomach, a sunflower sprouting out of a phone.
Ben Niesposziany, author of No Farther than the End of the Street