Red Memory

What if the origin of language were menstrual? In this cross-genre hybrid blend of languages, text, prose, and poetry readers dive into the ancient memory of original language. Anthropology, dreams, red garbage, and encounters with prairie dogs and hawks return to the age of questions: what makes us human? How did language evolve? Red Memory asks readers to forget what they've been taught and return to land, myth, dreams, and their own bodies, reclaiming the roots of language: blood and sound.

About the Author :
Amy holds an MFA from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics where she founded Wisdom Body Collective and was the recipient of the Leslie Scalapino and keri edward's scholarships for gender activism. She is an editor of More Revolutionary Letters: A Tribute to Diane di Prima. Her work can be read/is forthcoming in Entropy, Vol1 Brooklyn, Denver Quarterly, TYPO, Full-Stop, Ecotheo Review and elsewhere. @amybobeda on twitter. She currently lives in eastern Colorado where she teaches beginning writing and poetics.

Review :
With a sure poetic touch, Amy Bobeda takes us through a tangled dreamscape of red threads converging in a liberating new understanding of the world's most ancient taboo. --Chris Knight, Blood Relations. Red Memory is a vibrant tour of menstrual myth, poetry and ritual experience. --Camilla Power Amy Bobeda's Red Memory is a perfect book in so many ways. First of all, I learned a lot from it. en there's the fact that it rescues Charles Olson's concept of the saturation job-for the good of the matriarchy! Finally it leaves the reader with the lovely sensation of swimming into "the red thread of humanity's continued birth" (yes, menstrual blood). I appreciate the opportunity to open that old wound, shepherded along by a new young poet. -Lisa Jarnot, Robert Duncan, The Ambassador from Venus: A Biography Red Memory is a stunning multi-layered poem of what we need to know of telluric menses power. Amy Bobeda's generative book is rich with investigation, meditation, nocturnal thrum, cyclical ritual, complexity of blood-ow, that includes vivid dreams, synchronous sympathetic animalia, cave-lore, paint and psychic adornment. It is also a potent performance with an extended river of language, evocative collages and tension on its pages. Here we attune and attend to blood as glorious menses, as lyric sister, as what makes the world turn, as in the striking detail of the shiny red lycra suits the backup singers wear with JLo and Shakira at half time. I was struck by the poet's astute observation of how we bleed the world around us projecting blood letting on the outer sphere with fracking, oil drilling and horrors of war, and simultaneously eschew the inner world of healing, gnosis and celebration. Red Memory is an untethered, passionate and bold mini-epic feeling as primordial as blood itself. -Anne Waldman, Trickster Feminism