RIVER MUCK, BABY

praise

river muck, baby is the work of a mature writer - someone in command of their language who knows how to wield complex forms to startling effect. Blanchard takes familiar words and ideas and make them strange and unsettling. She turns nouns into verbs and looks at the body and the water in a new, haunting way.

It is a collection with an ecological imagination. Blanchard examines flora and fauna, skin and form with a probing, almost scientific intensity. Yet tempering that is a style that feels at once contemporary and historical, caught in time, and close to a litany in its richness. These are poems that understand themselves, and that speak and sing back to the traditions that helped shaped them. And yet in both the uttered and the white space, Blanchard has carved out a new and urgent voice in poetry. It is a luminous body of words from an exciting writer.

— Hannah Copley, author of Lapwing