All the Blood Involved in Love

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Maya Marshall is a formidable emerging poet. With this debut, she joins a vital literary heritage of Black poets whose stewardship rivals their written contributions. Comparable titles: The Black Unicorn Audre Lorde; Seeing The Body Rachel Eliza Griffths, Horsepower Joy Priest, etc. Maya is well-respected and beloved across art, literary, academic and community spaces; the support and anticipation will lend itself well to All the Blood Involved In Loves inevitable success.

Reviews

Confounded, mesmerized and enraged, women gaze long at their mothers. They rejoice and recoil at the possibility of sons and the sudden inevitable disappearing of sons. Craving just one unconquered root, they collect and shed lovers, some who are quivering mirrors, some edges that might be blades. Fathers boom tenet from every crevice. Never quite pinpointing the source of pain, women clutch tight their own bodies to hold in the hurricane. This workpenned as backslap for the black woman intending to stomp into, through and beyond the existence she is laughingly "allowed"harbors the hurricane's unrepentant muscle. Enter and risk. Enter and live.
Patricia Smith, author of Incendiary Art

All the Blood Involved in Love is at once the most Southern, most feminist, and Blackest book I have ever read. Maya Marshall witnesses the way we used that word in the old church, through a language so polished and exact that we feel cleansed by it as readers. This is a beautiful debut from a game-changing poet.
Jericho Brown, author of The Tradition

All the Blood Involved in Love is a lyrical work of psychological and temporal complexity gripped by questions of freedom, trauma, desire, imagination, and possibilities of Black girlhood and womanhood in the U.S. It is at once sensuous and terrifying, taut and lush, as in: Do these trees know / Do these trees know the grazing hem, the line / between sweet heat and deep sweat // The woman(s) sex. Her hanging. They must. / Her hair is made of them. I'm saying, this stunningly shiftful, strange, and exact book interrogates the histories with which our blood and time are written. It insists that there is power in such scrutiny. I'm saying, her Eye's on this: To save my life, I undress this disarray.
Aracelis Girmay, author of the black maria

Maya Marshalls All the Blood Involved in Love sounds the breadth and depth of embodied Black womanhood. This poet holds her pen to the fire and writes in flame, lines that are passionate, yet brutally precise. Black women move through the poems in relation to their various familiesbiological, chosen, longed for, remembered, imagined, or barely escaped. Hear me: Marshalls poetry collects and confronts some of our knottiest questions, our hardest truths. But it also illuminates the connections that buoy and strengthen us, the knowing that enables us to thrive.
Evie Shockley, author of semiautomatic

Intimate and understated in unflinching private, public mourning, All the Blood Involved in Love courses with an undeniable steady intensity throbbing at its tender jugular. Delivered with unnerving focus almost unbearabledeclarative observations, we dont just read Maya Marshalls poems, we breathe with them, and bleed with them: Tenderness is the impulse to protect /what you know you could destroy. /This is the gift of my fathers neck. This is a harrowing and illuminating book surging with intelligence and pulsing with new music. Maya Marshall writes with life force.
Robyn Schiff, author of Revolver

Author Bio

Maya Marshall is a writer and an editor. Author of the chapbook, Secondhand (Dancing Girl Press, 2016), she is also co-founder of underbellymag.com, the journal on the practical magic of poetic revision. Marshall has earned fellowships from MacDowell, Vermont Studio Center, Callaloo, Cave Canem, and the Community of Writers. She works as a manuscript editor for Haymarket Books and has served as a senior editor for [PANK]. Her writing has appeared in or is forthcoming in Best New Poets 2019 (University of Virginia Press), RHINO, Potomac Review, Blackbird, the Volta, and elsewhere.