Hum of Our Blood
by Madelyn Garner
$24.00
Please note, you will be taken to the 3: Taos Press website to complete your purchase.
In poem after stunning poem, Madelyn Garner’s Hum of Our Blood elegizes the son she knew and loved in all his human dimensions, speaking into those spaces usually left silent between mothers and sons. In a book of truth and life as much as it is about AIDS and death, Garner sheds lights both warm and bright on the darkest corners of gay existence in the l980s and 90s from a perspective continually surprising and, as strange as it may seem, delightful.
—Michael Broder, Drug and Disease Free —Jason Schneiderman, Primary Source
Selected for publication by 3: A Taos Press in the combined Tupelo Press/3: A Taos Press 2015 July Open
Confessional. Indictment. Devotional. Revelation.
Hum of Our Blood peels back time to the dawning days of the AIDS pandemic when the world seemed to be standing at the edge of a foreboding precipice. In an exploration that is both personal and universal, Garner’s poems expose the best and worst of humanity at times of peril. With language that cuts straight to the nature of grief as the author watches her beloved son’s body dying, Hum of Our Blood also stands as a love song to those, then or now, who would embrace one another despite what smolders in the blood: those who come to understand that death, no matter the reason, has its own rhythm, and grief, even at its darkest, instinctively moves toward light.