BLOOD ALLUVIUM
S. Preston Duncan
Poetry º 2024 º Parlyaree Press
78 pages º Paperback º Ebook
Blood Alluvium is a séance in free verse, lighting candles off the tension between Duncan’s Ashkenazi Jewish and Appalachian-Gael heritage, measuring breath by the fragile stillness between trauma and music. It is a cartography of grieving charted as a process of transmutation. It struggles with identity, God (and goddesses), and the police. Through moments of incantatory transcendence and the rushed wallowing of modernity, this collection consults the ancients, brushes up against nondualism, invokes the faded tartan of mythology, and ultimately makes a decision.
Decidedly Southern, lyric, and ritualistic, Blood Alluvium reaches for the universal, sheltering a sense of interconnectedness within the hooded growl of individuality, and harmony between apparently incompatible polarities.
The collection features 45 poems reflecting moments of creation, death, and the flood of all which comes in between.
ABOUT
S.Preston Duncan
S.Preston Duncan
S. Preston Duncan is a leathercrafter and death doula in Richmond, Virginia. He is the author of the limited risograph-printed pamphlet, The Sound in This Time of Being (BIGWRK, 2020), about which novelist Tom Robbins said, “Reading [these] poems today I had the feeling of having asked (and received) an autograph from starlight.”
Co-creator of the deconstructed poetry book and oracle deck, Lost Arcana, Duncan’s poetry has been commended as "fiercely lyric" by Anna Saunders, CEO of the Cheltenham Poetry Festival. His work has been commissioned by The Peace Studio, nominated for Best of the Net, shortlisted for the Art of Creative Unity Award, translated into Chinese by Poetry Lab Shanghai, and appeared in dozens of journals and anthologies, including [PANK], Poetry Bus, The Storms, HAD, Clarion, and Image Journal (forthcoming).