Purchase Hematology, winner of the 2021 Laureate Prize, here!

Kristin LaFollette is a writer, artist, and photographer from the Midwest. She is the author of Body Parts, winner of the 2017 GFT Press Chapbook Contest, and her poetry has appeared in Thin Air Magazine, Cimarron Review, Poetry South, and Common Ground Review, among others. She received an M.A. in creative writing from Indiana University South Bend and a Ph.D. in rhetoric and writing studies from Bowling Green State University. She is a professor at the University of Southern Indiana. Learn more about her work at kristinlafollette.com.

Praise for Hematology:

Kristin LaFollette’s Hematology is so aptly named—these are poems orbiting what families share and what they don’t, what blood can rouse and what it can’t. She writes, “My curses are shared / gifted to me more and more the older I get,” and then shows us—a bad back, trauma, winglessness—all the hidden-but-deeply-felt corporeal luggage we drag around. LaFollette’s poems are searching, fearless, and ultimately bend toward not hope exactly, but something like it: “If I am born, the trees will take care of the rest.”

—Kaveh Akbar, author of Pilgrim Bell

Kristin LaFollette’s debut full-length collection, Hematology, is as delicate, intricate, and necessary as a cluster of veins. Somehow, magically, the poems navigate between the grit of nature, the scent of earth, and the sting of concrete floors and hospital hallways, and then force us to reconcile them. At its heart, this collection is about family, what we inherit and what we take on. We see both the pain of belonging and not belonging, as the speaker reveals more and more about herself—first in relation to the bodies around her, as sister, as daughter, then gradually defines herself more and more from her own internal sites of  knowledge. In “Occupied,” LaFollette writes, “The point is that I only feel a sense / of quiet in the bodies of others, / my own mouth made from / gun smoke / & suture, / destined only to wound and / be wounded.” Hematology brings us from one moment to the next with deft precision: an accident in the woods, mud on sneakers, a hurt brother, a lost sister. Each time, the reader is wounded and sutured up again, hurt and healed. This collection bleeds and lets us see the mess, too.

—Roseanna Alice Boswell, author of Hiding in a Thimble

Kristin LaFollette’s Hematology is a lyrical, breathtaking, enrapturing book of poems that explore family, the body, and the heartbreaking loss of a close friend, a person often present in LaFollette’s poems. If you’ve experienced LaFollette’s work before, this book is an expansion of her considerable poetic powers. If you’ve not, you’re in for an absorbing read that will stay with you, that will have you returning to this beautiful book.

—Steve Henn, author of Guilty Prayer

If Kristin LaFollette’s Hematology is rooted in the corporeal, the slurry of blood and organ that is the body, it is also devoted to the erotics of family, to the bone and gristle that is the nest we call home, or at least what this speaker calls home. The poems seem to rise out of some fleshy bed in which the monsterly might emerge, and yet what we get, at least in part, is nostalgia for a brutal-seeming baseline, the comfort of the familiar—the “moss & clots of mud & leaf” and “her sternum, her quick breath a sign of lungs / like wet apricots”—where love emerges, a life run roughshod but indefatigable. I recognized the shining beauty emerging through all this woundedness throughout Hematology, where the speaker proclaims, “I am most myself in October / when I smell the nutrients that” join “me with someone else.” These poems light a path in the dark, visceral but honest. I loved Hematology.

—David Dodd Lee, author of Orphan, Indiana