Books

Blood to Purify the World

Spuyten Duyvil, 2025

“raise your hand if you menstruate, raise your hand if you ever menstruated, raise your hand if you came from the body of a menstruator, raise your hand and dance…”

With this invitation, Amy Bobeda’s A Blood to Purify the World invites all, and especially those who menstruate, to slide off the proverbial red shoes of folklore and abandon the idea of menstruation as a tiresome experience of exhaustion, pain and discomfort. A Blood to Purify the World invites readers to an enchanted world in which menstruation is more than a cycle of days, this many spent waiting, that many spent moody and cranky, this many spent bleeding, bloated, sore, split within with questions: Am I holy? Am I dirty? Am I fertile? Am I defiled? Here, the book says, remember this story. Eat this poem and let it soothe your weeping womb. Wipe the blood off your feet. Throw away those painful shoes. Try these on instead. Aren’t they comfortable? Don’t your feet feel cared for? Don’t you feel respected? Appreciated? Join the others and learn the steps to this moon dance. Do you see your innate connection to Life’s rhythmic patterns? Can you tune into that cadence? Will you take your place among those who bleed to make the world just?
—Helen Nde, The Watkins Book of African Folklore

What Bird Are You?

Finishing Line Press, 2023

Dogs begin to bark. It's the coldest night of February. The snow begins to howl. I've been reading Percy Bysshe Shelley, and this new collection by Amy Bobeda which displays such an implacable love for life & the biosphere. The way she speaks the syntax of myth, how she recognizes birds as inscrutable people who vanish into their own lives & deaths. Isn't it said humans first got poetry from listening to the whistle of migratory flocks? Amy Bobeda constructs rich colloquial poems, substantial as a clay pot, multi-hued as the lyric of a songbird. She reaches back, back, back, past the trees, past the city streets, until you see things you never knew before. Shelley wrote, "If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?" From the canyons of howling snow, with her book in hand I look straight into the valley of birds. Read these poems--Andrew Schelling, The Jack Kerouac School, author of The Facts at Dog Tank Spring

Red Memory

Flowersong Press, 2022

Red Memory is a stunning multi-layered poem of what we need to know of telluric menses power. Amy Bobeda's generative book is rich with investigation, meditation, nocturnal thrum, cyclical ritual, complexity of blood-ow, that includes vivid dreams, synchronous sympathetic animalia, cave-lore, paint and psychic adornment. It is also a potent performance with an extended river of language, evocative collages and tension on its pages. Here we attune and attend to blood as glorious menses, as lyric sister, as what makes the world turn, as in the striking detail of the shiny red lycra suits the

backup singers wear with JLo and Shakira at half time. I was struck by the poet's astute observation of how we bleed the world around us projecting blood letting on the outer sphere with fracking, oil

drilling and horrors of war, and simultaneously eschew the inner world of healing, gnosis and celebration. Red Memory is an untethered, passionate and bold mini-epic feeling as primordial as blood itself.

-Anne Waldman, Trickster Feminism