Rachel McKibbens’ “[Registered Trademark]: CrushingLoss,” blud (Copper Canyon Press, 2018)

By Maureen Alsop

blud, Rachel McKibbens’ third full poetry collection, graphically depicts the amalgamation of trauma and spirit. Something dies. Someone rasps. As a sparse example of the poem’s account of personal trauma, McKibbens writes through shock-wave:

”Nights my struck face
throbbed, when
my body swelled blue
from every pore,
I’d lie in bed
& pray to vanish...”

The solitary vanquish of aftereffect is depicted with brevity: stoic and fierce. The poems are saturated in blood by pulse, lineage and resolve. McKibbens’ grit in the depictions of childhood abuse and mental illness are unabashed and heartbreaking. Here, the reader’s empathy prevails over sympathy as McKibbens expresses integrity and honesty in a telling which must be told. The poem’s sparse lines are well-crafted to create an elegant structure. The collection integrates a portrait of fortitude and beauty. Yet this portrait maintains an equal intensity for the horror and anger which rein side by side.

A robbed, raped, broken-boned grandmother stands in the kitchen with her rapist “spreading butter onto bread.” The reader witnesses instances layered upon inferences of turbulent abuse and a glimpse of spiritual metaphors for redemption; as in this image of the broken body to the breaking of bread.

The poems wrangle with interpersonal and intergenerational trauma in which ancestors and future generations vaporize within one body, enacting a dissociative effect. McKibben’s narrator vanishes as a ghost-self and reiterates violence as an apparition. In various poems this theme of a disembodied half-self arises:

“…I’d willed
myself dead
so many years
I became apparition” … (pg. 83)

“Praise my eyes in the time
of apparition, each heretic winter...
litany of genetics...
Let me be what I am” (pg. 78)

“Apparition,
dark twin, heartless
daughter?” (pg. 12)

“What does the god of your childhood look like? A soft apparition pigeoned in the attic a wound eating you one year at a time?” (pg. 35)

In “echoes of heredity”... “ghosts of shame” (pg. 45) McKibbens targets the cause for the soul-torn bloodline’s bud, but states there is “No need to unbury / the tragedies of lineage.” She asks:

“Did they, too, imagine
becoming ghosts
like I have,
like I do?
Boneless satellites in lace
swaying above
their children’s heads?” (pg. 31)

The narrator’s dissociative capacity as a tool for survival travels a myriad of genetic twists into varying personal landscapes which detail mental illness, generational trauma, and shame’s unbidden shackles.

These are not poems for a shirking reader. The collection does not hold violence lightly nor distill the shock. The poems plead upon each page as the narrator seeks recovery for a tenderness lost. McKibbens writes in the poem “Salvage:”

“I have learned to need the body
I have spent years trying to rid the world of

...warped by ghost heat, carried, carried
by my loyal dead. I have learned
to crawl, to eat, to steep in your gentleness.”

In this passage the narrator yearns to understand, to grow, to manage, to self-nurture. How does one rely on a sense of safety, trust, kindness, with a lack such exposure?

The poems mine the prospect that the will to live is stronger than an inheritable desperation to die, and among the hardest lessons: to wholly love and accept oneself, complete in one’s raw wounds. The topography toward a personal sanctity of healing comes by breaking the parasitic cycle of abuse. McKibbens deftly articulates this process in the poems such as ”the last time” and ”the other children have agreed to forfeit their inheritance, ” she writes:

“we will go on
even as all
the poisons
of the house
reside in me...”

(from "the other children have agreed to forfeit their inheritance", p.85)

McKibbens depicts the psychological brandishing which constrains many survivors of abuse.


As narrative and writing are healing tools for trauma, McKibbens’ blud elevates an unfolding documentation in lyrical memoir. By each sinew, each image sketched upon the cellular frame of the body, McKibben liberates the void which has been consumed by the narrator’s pain.

“O captive, my captive!”, McKibbens exclaims, in a double entrende and tip of the hat to Whitman. She embraces a new parental figure, poetry’s foundational father, and ushers an emancipation from the Stockholm syndrome:

“I have coined your suffering song
have driven you back into your
hellish light.”

She releases the abuse back to the abuser. The reader’s pressure of the reader into places of severe pain and adaptation.

In blud’s broken-open ribcage, trauma bonds curl back into the gut and bind to other traumas, and is a worthy challenge to dissect.

Another way to release trauma? In McKibbens words:

“Draw the lunatic out,
throw that voice
slanted with madness into
the cemetery air”

The reader’s role as witness is a significant responsibility in the pathway to pain’s liberation. A listening is required among the poem’s dioramas of pain.

Rachel McKibbens’ voice resonates with a unique directness and personal power. Her authoritative poems are an act of leadership as she holds the reader in trust. McKibben’s blud claims the literary courage of grace and victory.