Honey & Blood, Blood & Honey by Rachel Morgan

Honey & Blood, Blood & Honey by Rachel Morgan

Chapbook examines type 1 diabetes from historical & personal perspectives

 

(Cedar Falls, IA) – The literary publisher Final Thursday Press is pleased to announce the publication of Honey & Blood, Blood & Honey by Rachel Morgan.  This thematic chapbook uses poetry to explore the historical and personal experience of type 1 diabetes in a series of carefully wrought and emotionally evocative poems.

Marvin Bell describes the collection as, “a brilliantly realized wedding of poetry, biology, and biography that details a mother’s care for a child diagnosed with type 1 diabetes.”

This collection twists the language of science and poetry, numbers and letters, but most crucially, the space between parent and child. Honey & Blood, Blood & Honey occupies a tenuous place between illness and wellness, in the moments and years after insulin was discovered, making type 1 diabetes a survivable disease. The poems in this collection move between direct address to the scientists who first discovered insulin in 1921, to the lyrical reflections of a mother as she laments the burden of chronic disease that comes with her young son’s type 1 diabetes. The language of science and parenthood infuse the poems, giving voice to the caregiver, where nothing is entirely gift or grief.

Rachel Morgan is the Poetry Editor of the North American Review, the nation’s oldest magazine, which is published at the University of Northern Iowa, where Morgan also teaches in the Department of Languages & Literatures.

Final Thursday Press is an award-winning publisher of literature based in Cedar Falls, Iowa.  Recent works from the press include the anthology Exs and Paul M. Hedeen’s Under a Night Sky.

Honey & Blood, Blood & Honey will be launched on Thursday, February 23rd at the Final Thursday Reading Series at the Hearst Center for the Arts at 7 p.m.  Rachel Morgan will appear as the featured reader on that night.  Honey & Blood, Blood & Honey, and all Final Thursday Press books, are available at University Book & Supply and through amazon.com. 

BIRTHDAY CAKE OR ICE CREAM

This morning you put your right shoe on

followed by the left when an itch disturbed the air.

Even a phantom limb longs to be scratched
by the existing. If you ask, I say one. Which one

you hope, already divining life is pairing off—

a useless spoon opposite its fork. One, I say again.

Against recklessness, against inevitable—
the one present calling out for the missing.