"What can I say about these words that they don't say for themselves? They are arresting, surprising, piercing, chilling, honest, and clear. They roll on as you turn the pages, much like their subjects roll on. Each burst on the page adds something: an accretion, a search for joy, the authentic self. This is the voice of someone struggling to become new in the oldest way possible: through the utterance of air passing over flesh and into the universe. This is Michael Delp's best book yet."?Doug Stanton, #1 New York Times bestselling author "This book is part blood transfusion, part means of transport to the outer dark of the cosmos. In that sense it is both lifesaving and soul-expanding. Who knew that grief could carry one so mortally far away from home, or that the griever could find his way back home by following the sound of the river? I read this book and came back to life.
"?Chris Dombrowski, author of Body of Water "Michael Delp is our most eloquent and innovative celebrant of rivers, but I was not prepared for the raw power of these elegies. Here is language condensed to its sinews and heart tissue?poems with the blood and flesh of dreams still clinging to them. They tell us how to live with 'the fist . inside the scar,' that loneliness has 'the memory of pure joy pounding on the door,' that grief 'is not shed like a skin; you carry it a lifetime.' I've always kept Mike Delp's books on the same shelf as Jim Harrison and Mary Oliver. Of Blood and Rivers gets a shelf of its own."?Jerry Dennis, author of Mornings at Jack Pin e and Up North in Michigan "What if a river could speak? If its meanderings cutting through the black earth were letters? Michael Delp is such a river, weaving poems out of tributaries, smoke, and fishing line. He rewrites the lyric impulse into elegiac prose poems small as stones on the riverbed?not as tombs, but precise epiphanies.
"?Sean Thomas Dougherty, author of Death Prefers the Minor Keys "Michael Delp, the mad angler and the river god, finds that each surface ripple, click of pebbles, or flash of fish has equivalents in the soul's own currents. Channeling Snyder, Bly, Han Shan, Harrison, and Kinnell, he creates meandering, mystical meditations on grief and joy, astonishment and anger, repose and discovery, and love and loss, capturing the susurrus of the self always searching, swimming, rising, and hooking the earthbound wonder of our days."?Norm Wheeler, Leelanau School Beach Bard "I read these grief-born meditations with pleasure, which seems like an odd way to respond to anguish and longing. The pleasure comes from being in the presence of unapologetic humanity and devotion, especially to words. Enacting for readers a deep dive into one's own consciousness while dipping one hand into a beloved river and the other into the stars feels generous and way-making. At some moments along the way I thought of Judith Minty's Yellow Dog Journal ; at some others, Rilke's Duino Elegies . We are lucky indeed to have Michael Delp's remarkable poem-prayers."?Alison Swan, author of River Mouth and A Fine Canopy (Wayne State University Press) "Michael Delp's Of Blood and Rivers is a book of wonders: prayers to be absorbed by the natural world, praying that world into the poems, which are themselves prayers that this world may continue.
These are poems that will absorb your attention, awaken your heart, and maybe take your breath away."?Dan Gerber.