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Each poem in Carmel Morse's debut collection, Bloodroot, opens fully in the sun of memory. And just like the plant from which the book takes its name, each poem blooms with paradox: delicate and enduring; simply designed yet emotionally complex. Even though ghosts of grandmothers, mothers, wives, daughters, aunts, and sisters travel through dreams and darkness when the flowers close, and even though "I am a woman in an inkwell, drowning / because she did not answer me," Bloodroot pulls down strength from the sun and sinks it into its juiced-red roots. Morse doesn't obscure the shimmering details of pain, but names and wonders and challenges. In doing so, this sharp poet transforms memories of abuse and regret into art.
-- Christine Stewart-Nuñez, South Dakota Poet Laureate and author of Bluewords Greening (Terrapin Books, 2016)
In Bloodroot, Carmel Morse's poems capture the experiences and the people that have shaped her life. The poems are made of concrete words and images. They also have a deeper level that captures the emotional and spiritual depth at the root of the experiences. The first poem, "Onyx," is charged with striking images and it tells a story. The father rejects his child because it is a girl; however, he gives the narrator a beautiful necklace. Sixteen years later, when she prepares to deliver her second child, the father cannot accept that the baby is a girl. He leaves no gift and two years later he leaves for good. The narrator's life is so hard she almost sells the necklace, but she cannot. In order to remain strong, she "would unwrap the necklace/from the tissue paper/and fondle the stone." Here is Eliot's Objective Correlative written with striking force, forging the experience in the reader's mind.
- Gary Pacernick, author of Memory and Fire: Ten American Jewish Poets (Peter Lang, 1989)
Bloodroot, an apt title for this collection, delves deep through family and personal history to explore what is has meant, and continues to mean, to be an independent woman in America, even though "jagged threads shriveled/into cables of dried blood/and snapped off at the roots years ago." Carmel Morse's poems seek out "staples that attempt/to gather my...loose ends" and in so doing, she provides a full pantry. She exposes how American culture has held women "to a tent/of beauty as surface perfection", delving beneath that surface to find both flaws and inner beauty. Ultimately, this collection pays tribute to the human capacity, despite torment and tragedy, to survive and to nourish its bloodline and dance the Charleston at a granddaughter's birthday party.
- Will Wells, author of Unsettled Accounts (Ohio University Press, 2010)
