Routine Bloodwork (Paperback)

By Colleen McKee

FINALIST FOR THE CHARLOTTE MEW PRIZE

“My heart is not a dove. There is nothing/peaceful about it,” declares the speaker in “The Pigeon.” Accordingly, we see the airports, schedules, and trysts that attend this restlessness. A beautifully-crafted villanelle, “The Wayside Inn,” anchors this chapbook and the lovers in a temporary harbor.
—Robin Becker, judge of the Charlotte Mew Prize and author of The Black Bear Inside Me

Fierce, funny, wise, and particular, Colleen McKee’s poems speak of love and loss across cities and bodies where the mind is a dryer set on “maximum setting,” and the words of a “mean, cute, crazy ex…ricochet” across the heart like a cascade of balls in a pinball machine. Like the most brazen of tightrope walkers, Routine Bloodwork crackles and delights.
—Hugh Behm-Steinberg, author of Animal Children

Although I have long admired Colleen McKee’s prose and verse collections—her poems, memoirs, and stories—this is the book we’ve been waiting for