Pamela Uschuk

Human rights activist Pamela Uschuk’s seven poetry collections include Crazy Love (American Book Award) and Blood Flower. Translated into twelve languages, her work appears widely in Poetry, Ploughshares, and others. Awards include Best of the Web, Dorothy Daniels Award (National League of American PEN Women), prizes from Ascent, New Millenium & Amnesty International. Editor of Cutthroat, Truth to Power, and Puro Chicanx Writers of the 21st Century, Black Earth Institute Fellow, Uschuk lives in Tucson. She leads writing workshops at the University of Arizona Poetry Center and is featured in Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day. She’s finishing her memoir, Of Thunderlight and Moon: An Odyssey Through Cancer.


All Books

Blood Flower

Pamela Uschuk

Publication Date: May 20, 2025

$18.95 Tradepaper

ISBN: 9781636282992

Description:

Blood Flower is a masterful exploration of resilience, love, and the echoes of history, set against the stark beauty of nature and the sharp edges of human conflict. Pamela Uschuk’s poetry weaves a tapestry of intimate personal struggles and broader societal turmoil. Her vivid language captures the visceral textures of life—from the Siberian tundra to family kitchens—and transforms pain, loss, and longing into transcendent art.

With themes ranging from the oppressive silences of political exile to the haunting legacies of war, Blood Flower is a poignant tribute to the enduring power of the human spirit. Uschuk’s voice, sharp as a wolf’s howl and tender as a lover’s whisper, invites readers to confront both the scars of the past and the fragile hope of renewal. This is a collection for anyone who dares to seek beauty in the ashes and strength in vulnerability.

ADVANCED PRAISE

“Every syllable of Blood Flower’s warm and revelatory tapestry pulses with discovery—the unearthing of familial ties, the realization of strengths and frailties, the speaking of secrets out loud. The life story that springs from these lines is ultimately undaunted—but the real lessons lie in the journey.”
Patricia Smith, author of Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah

“Dense with the colors of ancestral Russia and the American Southwest, the passionate, mindful poems in Blood Flower oppose to loss and sorrow and the multitudinous depredations of history their meticulous tribute to the tangible world of nature and human love. To the unspeakable wreckage of war and the irreparable harm it visits upon father, brother, husband, these poems oppose a hard-won vision of healing and renewal. Even Chernobyl, abandoned by the species that poisoned it, has spawned new herds of buffalo. Divested of illusion and euphemism, these poems have no time for easy pessimism either. They are a tribute to the world we must refuse to abandon.”
Linda Gregerson, author of The Selvage

““It’s the Russian in me that charges out / in my dark velvet skirts,” and indeed Pamela Uschuk charges into our lives in a variety of forms that explore her background and its larger cultural implications for our world. If on the one hand she can find hope and solace in that past, however mysterious and half hidden, she is also aware of “what breathes between the dawn death of stars” and leads us “into black holes of longing.” Most poets would stop there, but Uschuk charges against that bleakness the way “Defying extinction, cranes snap up blue crabs / in their anthracite beaks, then / roost in branches heaving reflected light.” It is that reflected light in this, her best book, that gives us faith to charge along with her.”
Richard Jackson, author of Heartwall and Out of Place

Refugee

Pamela Uschuk

Publication Date: May 10, 2022

$18.95 Tradepaper

ISBN: 9781636280196

Description:

Refugee deals with refugees of many kinds—political refugees, refugees from racism, from domestic violence, from environmental destruction and disease, specifically cancer—and their stories of cruelty and courage, hardship, and hope to overcome the most daunting of circumstances.

Taking the reader across our country through the varied landscapes of Colorado, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Arizona, Refugee discusses the nature of seeking shelter. We are all refugees looking for a haven from whatever oppresses our lives. What constitutes a refugee is at the heart of the collection. Poems confront and explore xenophobia, sexism, gun violence, domestic violence, corporate greed, and their ties to environmental destruction and political and economic tyranny. An ovarian cancer survivor, the author also writes about her own courageous confrontation with death. These inspiring poems ultimately call for the reader to recognize the refugee condition as a human condition. They call for a change in consciousness in the forms of action and compassion. They call for the reader to thrive. Ranging from short lyric poems to narrative poems, this collection steeped in rich, sensual imagery draws inspiration and healing from the natural world. Truth lies in recognition of the interdependence of all life. Refugee is an odyssey to find grace and unity in a besieged and divided contemporary American society.

ADVANCE PRAISE

“There is a position in yoga called “the shining heart.” This is how Pam Uschuk has approached her poems in Refugee. Pam Uschuk is on fire. She has carried her song and vision across deserts and over mountains. Witness and beauty undivided.”
— Luis Alberto Urrea, author of House of Fallen Angels

“With tenderness, expansive compassion, and profound gifts of radiant description, Pamela Uschuk considers so many ways people may be estranged and lost in this precious, difficult world. With brave ferocity, her poems in Refugee navigate new vision and reconnection, so desperately longed for right now and always.”
— Naomi Shihab Nye, author of The Tiny Journalist

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Reviews

Pamela Uschuk’s REFUGEE Earns a Kirkus Star!

A mordantly tender triumph rich with natural imagery. Uschuk’s poetry collection calls out authoritarianism and social injustice. This moving set of poems offer messages of hope as it addresses timely […]

REFUGEE by Pamela Uschuk reviewed in Rain Taxi

“’So you think that you can live remote / from city streets paved with bullet casings, / mass shootings in churches, refugee mothers in cages,’ Pamela Uschuk questions in ‘A […]