Please note that 100% of profits from Mandy’s book will be donated to Type 1 Diabetes research charities, made in Mandy’s honor.

Mandy May’s Bone / Blood / Blossom is both a grimoire and a chronicle of chronic illness. The poet channels the magic and music of language to transform “the body’s resilient failure” into this book of offerings, spells, prayers, invocations, ablutions, sigils, tinctures, charms, chalices, runes, and readings, the “holy panic of abandon”—and—despite it all—blessings, and thanks. “Go to the ghosts for ingredients,” instructs May, and, “Be sure to leave an offering,” not for a deity (“unworried god” already elegized), but for the skin, which will “One day . . . come back / for all that’s been torn from its stretch.” May writes, “All I want to do is try to make sense of my body,” its womb a “rotten pomegranate of spent sentiment,” its ache and inflammation, its cysts and scars. Here on earth, the sensate is always both torment and solace, but May’s gaze goes farther and further still: “The moon is in my periphery. / There they believe my pain is real.” 

—Dora Malech, author of Flourish and editor of The Hopkins Review

“I am open. I am expansive. / I am indigo and other.” Equally wound and wonder, this book is a conjuring—of the boldly sensual, of awe-terrors from the natural world as well as the Target clearance section, of strange tendernesses galore. Rarely has there been a poet as adept at surprising diction (think Lucie Brock-Broido), startling insight (think Linda Gregg), fervent lists (think Mary Ruefle), and uncompromising dream logic (think Mandy May). I am utterly under the sway of this poet who understands that to poem is to sing wildly. How heart-expanding, the wild song of Bone/Blood/Blossom. What a gift, this “spell book of sass and song.” 

—Chen Chen, author of Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency

May's magnificent voice transcends mortality in this moving collection of poems that give us a glimpse into her life and inspire us to look closer at our own.

—Abby Norman, author of Ask Me About My Uterus

The body as muscle / as machine / as miracle," writes the poet, Mandy May, whose name, too, is an alliteration of m's, testifying to her finely-tuned ear. These poems emanate from the body, the poet having discovered a metaphorical way of being in tender, painful conversation – teeth, skin, bone, heart, ovaries, throat, blood, lungs . . . "My mouth is a wound," asserts May, "every rib of me pours out," "everything hurts, and my mouth swells at the honesty." As heartbreaking as it is to read this extraordinary collection by a gifted poet whose life ended prematurely, I am in awe of the wild beauty of this book, and poetry's restorative power to grant blossoming, renewed life to her readers."  

—Kendra Kopelke, author of Hopper and editor of Passager Books