Blood Wolf Moon: Poems - Paperback

by Elise Paschen (Author)

WINNER of the 2026 Oklahoma Book Award in Poetry

"A magical map of memory and vision."--Dean Rader, author of Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry

In her mesmerizing sixth poetry collection, Blood Wolf Moon, Elise Paschen weaves constellations throughout, of stars and birds and light and darkness and beauty and horror and nature and humans and history, making shape and meaning of what's around us and even who we are.

In this riveting sixth poetry collection, Paschen explores the story lines of her Osage heritage. The core of the book grapples with a dark period of American history, "The Reign of Terror," when outsiders murdered individual members of the Osage for their oil headrights. Paschen searches her cultural past and family history in poems about the land, ancestors, childhood, loss, nature, transformation, flight and language.

In this cinematic book, she builds drama in overlapping narratives, reinventing ways to approach the line on the page. Described by poet Timothy Donnelly as "one of today's most formally astute poets," Paschen opens Blood Wolf Moon with the long poem, "Heritage," a bracelet of crown poems, then shifts registers to formal poems and prose sequences. Poet and editor Ester Belin calls the concluding poems with their use of Osage language, "significant leaps into literary sovereignty." Blood Wolf Moon Captivates with its emotional intensity and unrelenting quest for the translation of identity. It's a book you can't put down.

Author Biography

Elise Paschen, an enrolled member of the Osage Nation, is the author of Tallcheif, The Nightlife, Bestiary, Infidelities (winner of the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize) and Houses: Coasts. As an undergraduate at Harvard, she received the Garrison Medal for poetry. She holds MPhil and DPhil degrees from Oxford University. Her poems have been published widely, including in Poetry magazine, the New Yorker, When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry and The Best American Poetry. She is the editor of The Eloquent Poem and has edited or coedited numerous other anthologies including the New York Times bestseller, Poetry Speaks. A cofounder of Poetry in Motion, Paschen teaches in the MFA Writing program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.