Blood Lies: Race Trait(or) by Karla Brundage

 

Karla Brundage’s Blood Lies: Race Trait(or) is about race. It is about the history of race, about imposed racial definitions like mulatto and quadroon. And then next to these historical poems are heart rending poems about how race is lived now, about the way these racial impositions continue to resonant. But it is not all about being caught. What makes this book so strong is that it is also about moments of escape from these terms too.  It is a book that is biting and yet affirmative.

–Juliana Spahr

 

Karla Brundage unbends rivers in this poetic investigation of a settler colonial project that has gone on for too long. De-animated and alienated too many souls. In this collection, double consciousness is revisited and interrogated fiercely by an inspired, confident hand and unbroken psyche. Proving that messianic tasks are found, accepted and achieved in craft; Brundage continues to be a wonder we hope to be worthy of.

–Tongo Eisen-Martin

 

In the full-length poetry collection Blood Lies: Race Trait(or) by Karla Brundage, we find a wholly original clarion voice. This remarkable volume is proof of poetry’s power to illuminate, investigate, invoke. Read this book slowly, in sequence as a story of living at the delta of liminalities and navigating them through the rivers of history, language, lies, and fears born out. In the poem “Octoroon: (noun),” the author examines how language is used to colonize the Black female body: “Great Grandma Maude is quadroon, her mom mulatto, her grandma French / octoroon?/ Why then, do they call out Mulatto?” A case can be made that poetry is akin to the DNA tests, revealing essential truths and ineradicable history, in blood, shame, and beauty. Brundage uses eloquent concision to amplify big mysteries and truths. These poems link together to build a story–the poet's story. In “Underneath,” she writes of early childhood: “The first man to visit me after I was born was/ Eldridge Cleaver and his wife Kathleen/ I remember drawing castles with Angela Davis/ Laying in her lap while my mom gave a speech.” This bold and urgent collection reveals an important voice for social justice, earned insights turned into an intellectual koan. Karla Brundage translates her own journey into poetic testimony.

–Maw Shein Win, Storage Unit for the Spirit House (Omnidawn)

 

In Blood Lies: Race Trait(or), Karla Brundage relates, contextualizes, complicates, and deconstructs her experiences as a mixed race woman living in the US. Brundage’s poems pulsate with an innate understanding that the social construction of limiting identities–mulatto, octoroon, quadroon, woman, wife–is troubled by a history that is scarred, scarring, and nebulous. This history includes the rape and ownership of Black women by men, creating a lineage in which ancestors cannot easily be traced and cycles of systemic oppression cannot easily be broken. The burdens of having one’s personhood measured and tiered according to constructs like race and gender wrestle with the inner, human truths that defy societal stereotypes: “One drop of African blood/Makes you legally a Negro in 1707/What makes you legally a Negro now?”

–Shilpa Kamat

 

Blood Lies: Race Trait(or) is imbued with a sense of searching for answers where there may never be any. None that are tangible or pleasant but determined by the evolution of language and the human propensity for categorizing others. Where do we fit, or “what makes you legally a Negro now?”  Karla Brundage has the ability to write in a way that both draws you into its elegance while forcing you to deal with the weight and violent implications of mixed blood over generations. Brundage constructs the self through what constitutes the terms Black and woman, each encapsulated in conceptions of the past, in “unspoken rememories” we must sift through to enlighten our present and envision our future.

–Raihana Haynes-Venerable

 

With Blood Lies: Race Trait(or), Karla Brundage steps into the tangled knot of colonial histories and their resulting math–illogical, tortured, tortuous–of racial categories. Her poems go to the dictionary and find all the violence language holds, how it gets written and re-written onto the body. But Brundage does not stop there. At turns critical, mythic, full of wonder, grief, and rage, she uses the language of racist definitions to both uncover the past and “re member” what’s been violated. Blood lies transverses past and present, paying particular attention to what it means to be marked as mixed race and female, to be (or not be) a wife. This work asks its reader to confront all the relations where human life is reduced to property, the unbearable weight of that, and what it means to live through it. ­

 –Stephanie Young

 

Do we live in two Americas? If so, what is life like within these different Americas, and how do they all interact? Karla Brundage’s Blood Lies explores these questions, while raising others you didn’t know you needed answering.  Blood Lies tackles the topics of race, love, sexuality, rape, and discrimination. This collection is meant to elicit discussions for those who want to understand self and others, and bridge the gaps of differences amongst us all.

–Brea Watts

 

Karla  Brundage’s newest collection of poetry throws the reader into a labyrinth of history, family, blood, hurt and joy. “Blood” and “Mulatto” are not just provocative terms she sprays on her pages;  instead, they represent a legacy of familial challenges and personal redemption that must be excavated and explored here. Karla Brundage. Karla Brundage. Say that name twice and commit it to memory since she is the poet to know now.

–Allison E. Francis, Professor, Playwright & Director of Ex-Colored Man

 

With Race Trait(or), Karla Brundage enters into the logic of racial math, whipping through its cunning calculus in search of the bodies, families, cultures and worlds that have been flung into psychic pieces by its absurd equations.

 

She journeys in words toward her fragmented family, an inheritance of mixing eons old for human kind. Yet in the US the mulatta’s arteries lay a labyrinth of haunted love and memorialization floored with black and white tiles, of hair and blood, and of genes and skins.

–Duana Fullwiley