In Emily Hockaday’s Blood Music, the speaker states “I have never known how to locate / or read the lifeline”—yet this beautifully braided collection is nothing if not an intricate study of lifelines. As the speaker’s pregnancy progresses, her child growing in “that unseen ocean,” she must also watch as ALS’ “indifferent tide erodes / the body of my father,” and addiction ravages her brother. The speaker is “cleft,” adrift in beginnings and endings, in the starkly gorgeous and the unspeakably tragic, in the struggle to accept what often feels unacceptable: “We all / have finite seasons, even Emily, even these fresh Spring blossoms.” The achievement of Blood Music is its celebration of those blossoms even though—or because—they cannot possibly last.

—Jessica Walsh, author of Book of Gods and Grudges