upon waking by Margaret Bleichman

How do we learn well / the unspoken language of mother, grief, blood, diaspora, gender, history, self? Infused with emotional restraint & laced with careful exposures, the poems in UPON WAKING read as a tribute to silences–chosen, enforced or inevitable, the spaces we occupy when we stand inside a blue and green / relief map of the world. M. Bleichman‘s poems remind me how documentation can lend such connective tissue to the muscle of poetics, & how even what we do not have language for can transform us, can become deliverance in the poet’s hands.
–Joan Kwon Glass, author of DAUGHTER OF THREE GONE KINGDOMS

Margaret Bleichman’s first book upon waking pays attention. Throughout this thoughtful collection, Bleichman boldly interrogates faith, ancestry, inherited diaspora, and social injustice within our current American moment. The carefully articulated poems in the collection draw upon a variety of cultural traditions to point us to the ways in which the daily routines of our lives can be seen as, and become, sacred acts of attention. The title poem of the book brings the reader into intimate proximity with a hand-washing ritual—just reading the poem becomes a form of prayer. The variety of poetic forms utilized in upon waking—golden shovel, sonnet, abecedarian, and persona poems—express Bleichman’s vision with muscularity, energy, and compassion. upon waking is a work that wakes us up to notice the world around us, to notice the Musk and holiness/Wisp and curl that just might repair the world.
–Anastasia Vassos, author of Nike Adjusting Her Sandal

Bleichman’s Upon Waking opens with ritual hand-washing, then the casting of sins of the past year into moving water. There are whirlpools of memory, history, family, language: “My mother’s tongue/was not my mother tongue.” There is a sitz bath for a dying friend and a brother “on deck.” Bleichman’s work is clear, refreshing, and worth a deep dive.
–Maureen McElroy, author of For Crying Out Loud and Car Poems