In her riveting sixth poetry collection, Blood Wolf Moon, Elise Paschen explores the story lines of her Osage heritage. The core of the book grapples with a dark period of American history, “The Reign of Terror,” when outsiders murdered individual members of the Osage for their oil headrights. Paschen searches her cultural past and family history in poems about the land, ancestors, childhood, loss, nature, transformation, flight, and language. In this cinematic book, she builds drama in overlapping narratives, reinventing ways to approach the line on the page. Described by poet Timothy Donnelly as “one of today’s most formally astute poets,” Paschen opens Blood Wolf Moon with the long poem, “Heritage,” a bracelet of crown poems, then shifts registers to formal poems and prose sequences. Poet and editor Esther Belin calls the concluding poems with their use of Osage language, “significant leaps into literary sovereignty.” Blood Wolf Moon captivates with its emotional intensity and unrelenting quest for the translation of identity. It’s a book you can’t put down.

ADVANCE PRAISE

“I have a name / 𐓻𐓘𐓻𐓟 𐓘𐓜𐓣́͘𐓟.” These are the final lines of “Heritage,” a brilliant series of crowns that begins Elise Paschen’s remarkable Blood Wolf Moon. In poems both lyrical and conversational, both traditional and experimental, Paschen explores what it means to name one’s personal and tribal past while looking for the language to aptly articulate our present condition. A magical map of memory and vision, Blood Wolf Moon connects the poet to Oklahoma, Chicago, France, her children, her ancestors, the Osage language, the Wahzhazhe, and even Killers of the Flower Moon. Paschen’s poemschart the many paths to the poet’s identity, but they also illuminate our own journeys. Blood Wolf Moon is smart and sad and beautiful and haunting. I love this book. It is a revelation.”—Dean Rader, author of Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry

“Elise Paschen’s powerful new book of poetry, Blood Wolf Moon, is the culmination of investigating contradictory layers of familial and cultural heritage. The epigraph comes from an Osage song, “To the door of the House of Mystery I have come,” such an appropriate invitation to this collection. The heritage of parentage is most potent in this living, however, in that configuration is the ongoing mystery the mother root provokes in daughters, especially when your mother belongs to the world, not just the domestic sphere. Paschen is always formally aware. In this endeavor, the formal weave embraces give, and she finds a taut freedom. She flies. This is her best book.”—Joy Harjo, former US Poet Laureate