Blood of the Air creates a new mythology, repurposing spectacle, stereotype, and song. Inspired by the fictions and frictions of the past, each poem in this collection complicates the next. Lush lyrical moments give way to fracture, vulnerability, and reinvention. The title poem—one of several found poems—calls attention to stories told in the wake of sexual violence. In “She Said,” the collection’s longest piece, language culled from the transcript of a 17th century rape trial feels eerily familiar. Formally dexterous and refreshingly bold, the poems in Blood of the Air are urgent, moving, and fiercely imagined. Though blood can flow from the site of a wound, Codjoe seems to say, blood is also a sign of life.

You can purchase the collection directly from Northwestern University Press HERE.

Ama Codjoe has been awarded support from the Cave Canem, Saltonstall, Jerome, and Robert Rauschenberg Foundations as well as from the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, Crosstown Arts, Hedgebrook, and the MacDowell Colony. Her recent poems have appeared in The Common, Massachusetts Review, Southern Indiana Review, and elsewhere. Codjoe is the recipient of a 2017 Rona Jaffe Writer’s Award, the Georgia Review’s 2018 Loraine Williams Poetry Prize, a 2019 DISQUIET Literary Prize, and a 2019 NEA Creative Writing Fellowship.

Praise for Blood of the Air

“Ama Codjoe’s extraordinary debut poetry chapbook, Blood of the Air, conveys a sense of urgency, vulnerability, and Codjoe’s mastery of the poetic craft. Winner of Northwestern University Press’ 2019 Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize, Blood of the Air explores narratives of women and women figures who have lived, lost, resisted, been subject to breaking and other people’s definitions, and who have reclaimed their breaths and freedom . . . Within Codjoe’s poetry there is blood but there is also hope and the will to live.” —Nadia Alexis, BLACKSTEW