Blood to Purify the World, Blood to Purify the World

“raise your hand if you menstruate, raise your hand if you ever menstruated, raise your hand if you came from the body of a menstruator, raise your hand and dance…”With this invitation, Amy Bobeda’s A Blood to Purify the World invites all, and especially those who menstruate, to slide off the proverbial red shoes of folklore and abandon the idea of menstruation as a tiresome experience of exhaustion, pain and discomfort. A Blood to Purify the World invites readers to an enchanted world in which menstruation is more than a cycle of days, this many spent waiting, that many spent moody and cranky, this many spent bleeding, bloated, sore, split within with questions: Am I holy? Am I dirty? Am I fertile? Am I defiled? Here, the book says, remember this story. Eat this poem and let it soothe your weeping womb. Wipe the blood off your feet. Throw away those painful shoes. Try these on instead. Aren’t they comfortable? Don’t your feet feel cared for? Don’t you feel respected? Appreciated? Join the others and learn the steps to this moon dance. Do you see your innate connection to Life’s rhythmic patterns? Can you tune into that cadence? Will you take your place among those who bleed to make the world just?—Helen Nde, The Watkins Book of African FolkloreA Blood to Purify the World continues where Amy Bobeda’s first book left off, by bleeding together the edges of image, concrete poetry, lyric essay, and citation to create a tapestry of menstrual justice. Bobeda deftly weaves poems and prose and fragments and folklore. The text here forms a textile, a rag, for soaking up the transformative power of bodies that bear a womb. In Bobeda’s skillful hand, menstruation becomes “ritual grammar” balanced by amenorrhea’s ritual silences. Prose slenders into poetry at the end like the last threads of blood—this collection is a cycle. It is a timely work that breaks reproductive taboo by showing where that taboo’s already been broken or never existed. This is a book I’ve so sorely needed.—Laura Wetherington, Parallel Resting Places