Congratulations to 2023 COURAGE to WRITE Writer of Note Emily Hockaday for the upcoming publication of her poetry book, Blood Music.
Through pregnancy and birth, a father’s illness and death, and a sibling’s addiction crisis, these poems examine the function of love as a body grows, fails, or transforms.
This is especially exciting, as this is the project Emily was awarded a grant for!
“In these dead years, a new life tumbles inside me,” Emily Hockaday writes in her collection, Blood Music, poems that celebrate small beauties found despite the tumult of recent loss. These poems contain the miraculous, the hideous, the joyful, and the grotesque as she recounts her pregnancy while reflecting on both her brother’s drug addiction and her father’s physical decline and passing. Steeped in emotional upheaval, there are images of what has been ravaged and what is blooming: her brother’s skin, her father’s skeletal frame, the remains of a childhood treehouse, her unborn child swimming in the ocean of her body. In these poems, holding a life inside of you can be a way to move through grief. It can also be a reason to live. As she writes to her unborn daughter in her poem Aubade, “Fog can only hide us for so long. I carry you.”
—Meghan Sterling, author of View from a Borrowed Field and Self-Portrait with Ghosts of the Diaspora