Work by Bloodlight

Work by Bloodlight is the first full-length collection of poetry by Maine Poet Laureate Julia Bouwsma. The poems in Work by Bloodlight are earthy, meticulous, and essential.   Julia Bouwsma lives off-the-grid in the mountains of western Maine, where she is a poet, homesteader, editor, teacher, small-town librarian and Maine's sixth Poet Laureate (2021-2026). Bouwsma is the author of two poetry collections, Midden (Fordham University Press, 2018) and Work by Bloodlight (Cider Press Review, 2017), both of which received the Maine Literary Award for Poetry Book. Other honors include the Poet's Out Loud Prize (2016-17), the Cider Press Review Book Award (2015), and residency fellowships from the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Vermont Studio Center, Monson Arts (Monson, ME), and Annex Arts (Castine, ME). Bouwsma's poems and book reviews can be found in Cutthroat, Green Mountains Review, Poetry Daily, Poetry Northwest, RHINO, River Styx, and other journals. She currently serves as the Library Director for Webster Library in Kingfield, ME and teaches in the Creative Writing department at the University of Maine at Farmington.   "The elegiac is a most tender and yet most rigorous accounting. Every detail of its fact and decorum must register upon flesh, upon the syllables of flesh. In Work By Bloodlight, Bouwsma unfailingly discovers the higher registers and the keenest syllables. They beautifully prove to be a "wingspan against snow." —Donald Revell "What an earthy song, these poems! They rise up from the dark earth, the images quirked and turned to serve a raw transformative vision in this twenty-first century book of seeing with your eyes open. This book will be useful for visionaries, taxidermists, and all those who look for the exact knowledge of the sacred in profane earthy humanness." —Joy Harjo