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Bloodstream: Poems

By author: Sarah Carey
Product Code: P736
ISBN: 9798897360130
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Sarah Carey's second full-length poetry collection traces the arterial pathways of the poet's past, mapping the vital currents that pulse between memory, perception, and identity. Anchored in place yet mindful of time's fluidity, the poems in BLOODSTREAM traverse Carey's Southern roots in Florida and North Carolina, moving through Alaska and beyond as the poet cycles between past and present, faith and doubt, while exploring the power of language to illuminate such contrasts. The poems elegize lost loved ones, including pets, which serve as a lens through which to examine attachment, loss, and unconditional love. Carey's verses serve as containers: rooms within rooms housing shape-shifting selves and lives in transition. Simultaneously, the poet reflects on broader natural ecosystems, including histories of specific flora and fauna, and her place within them. Whether investigating pigment structures, the nature of desire, or family heritage, Carey consistently contemplates language itself, asserting poetry's essential role in witnessing life's complexities. The work offers unexpected perspectives, from palm trees reflecting on evolution to encounters with Galapagos terrain, capturing both physical and existential landscapes. At its core lies an exploration of how perception shapes consciousness and memory. Carey explores color science, revisits childhood memories, reimagines her prenatal self, and reflects on childlessness and the personas she has embodied throughout her lifetime. Throughout BLOODSTREAM, Carey resurrects ancestors while examining her physical and emotional inheritance, probing the power of words, the weight of silence, and the corporeal rhythms of memories coloring past, present, and future.
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Reviews

Review by: Lisa Zimmerman, author of THE LIGHT AT THE EDGE OF EVERYTHING and SAINTED - December 27, 2025
"Sarah Carey's second collection opens the vein of her life to take inventory of what is given, what is lost, and what is shared. 'My words, my tongue, my tone, are never mine alone,' her speaker tells us. In BLOODSTREAM the poems move 'through history handed down,' and gaze unflinchingly at family tragedies and with eyes of love on all that remains--the dogs, the sisters, the beloved, the water and trees of Florida, to find 'that heart beside my own bud heart, / from which all new leaves come.'"
Review by: Sean Sexton, author of PORTALS and MAY DARKNESS - December 27, 2025
"Blood and wonder run through Sarah Carey's tender, self-effacing second volume of poetry where loss plays its upper hand with love in a discourse that begins with the query: Who were we when others couldn't see? The question propels us through incidentals of existence: aging, the demise of parents, and one's own procession through the poles of being. There's a strange and fortuitous literary underpinning of science in this voice, enlivening, and deepening eloquent language of the author's self-given task: how to discern nature vs. nurture comprising her journey--to the yet unlocated land of oneself."
Review by: Sally Rosen Kindred, author of WHERE THE WOLF - December 27, 2025
"With a keen lyric longing and a voice that blends tenderness and candor, the poems of Sarah Carey's BLOODSTREAM ponder lineage, the who and how of one woman's becoming. These poems roam the complex embodied experiences of touching a healing horse, trying on a dead mother's bodysuit to find it does not fit, and entering the breath 'that knows just how far back, how deep to go.' They explore perception in the context of aging, memory, discovery and desire, love and grief. Carey's work asks what it means to witness the world through the life and lens of a woman artist, revealing tensions between creator and creation, seen and unseen, telling and untold, the 'artist overlooking the Maine meadow' and 'the woman overlooked.' Self-portraits invoke the speaker as a longleaf pine who will 'draw breath from toes to gut, lungs to throat, all the way up,' and as a royal palm whose 'roots…reach deep enough to threaten a foundation.' There is a claiming here, and a reckoning--a celebration of endurance in an intimate, open-eyed remembering."

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