Bloodstream, Sarah Carey’s sophomore poetry collection, comes shortly after her full-length debut, The Grief Committee Minutes, published in 2024 from Saint Julien Press. With forty years in journalism and communications, Carey approaches poetry with an eye experienced and hands adept at directing the reader’s attention. Her generous voice reaches across the page to welcome the reader on a journey through Florida, North Carolina, and Alaska, pausing to consider the flora and fauna of each landscape; to sit with blood relatives and chosen family; and to enter each poem, asking together—after this, and this, and this, who am I now? Here, poetry is confident in its mode as an ever-shifting locus of perspective in a life and world turning faster than we can comprehend. Bloodstream is part elegy, part fragmented memoir—it is a blueprint that holds past, present, and unfulfilled futures; the speaker’s multitude of selves; and beginnings and endings that fold into and out of one another.
Bloodstream is organized into six sections, progressing in a nonlinear and cyclical movement of reflection, interspersed with the present thrusts of each new day, each new breath. These poems exist like rooms in a house, like a succession of shells, like garments that the speaker pulls from an overstuffed closet. These containers of momentary attention complement each other as the book builds momentum, layering and conflating the poems into an interdependent structure. These poems consider not only the past nor the future, but also the tension between them. In the opening poem, we learn that “bloodstream is an anchorage” and yet, that “[w]here we come from / doesn’t ordain what we cling to.” There is no denying the blood linkage between parent and child as well as the potential for grief when that chain ends. Carey reckons with the fact that her lineage will end with her, and in turn determines to “take from childlessness // a holy solitude, a shell.” For this poet, grief is another room, another space to fill when she considers—referencing her dog Max—“No children for me all those years, // only his kiss.”
Memory is suspect but invaluable to this speaker as she revisits departed family members and reckons with their legacy. Memories of family now departed are bittersweet for her, as she reflects: “Hear Father translate nostalgia / from Greek roots: return home and pain.” The southern sonic landscape runs deep roots in this family alongside tragedy and lingering questions:
. . . I dream of freeing
whatever is stuck on the roof
and flying, of Grandmother S.—
how she’d call us dahlin, with the long ahh
of Southern r-lessness . . .
The residual imprints of departed family extend into the speaker’s present in unexpected ways—in remembered words from another language, in old books locked away. In “My Husband and I Engage in Estate Planning,” a poem approaching the end of the collection, the speaker begins to loosen her grip, relinquishing the stranglehold kept on life, trusting her partner with the necessary choices near life’s end. Unlike some of her own departed family, the speaker determines to leave behind words indicating her wishes during and after death, doing what she can to prepare those left behind.
As blood is a literal and figurative stand-in for lineage, clothing is a physical and metaphorical representation of internal desires and fears. In one poem, “[w]ant hits a roof and shreds / its shingles, a garment / worn to the bone.” Carey addresses the evolution of the body and the self across time until the speaker says, “. . . nothing I knew about myself / as true will fit, and in darkness I change.” Is it clothing that fails to fit the new body and new self, or the reverse? Is it possible to match our own perceived sense of self with external presentation? Is that agreement even desirable or necessary to feel ‘whole’? Considering this dual nature in the context of driving an automobile, the speaker states, “From then on, I ran my rides into the ground, / like the body inside my body: revved, hot.” For the speaker, the body is twofold, like a person inside the frame of a vehicle, like the soul inside the frame of muscle, skin, hair, and bone. In the penultimate poem, newly orphaned, the speaker tries on her mother’s bodysuit and finds it ill-fitting. This residual form of the mother fails to summon her from the dead or to reincarnate her within the speaker. The shell of clothing has been left empty, and the present absence it represents is unfillable.
Within this collection, the speaker travels across Florida and North Carolina while surviving the death of multiple beloved pets, a grandmother, and both her father and mother. However, in the center of this constellation of deaths is a second life, a new beginning—evidenced by the speaker’s stated intentions to “then drop the leafless ends in water, / attempt to tempt the tendrils to root.” Later, the speaker reflects on how she hacked at the diseased and dying parts of a rosebush: “I . . . wiped blood from my ungloved hands // my skin in the game, as if to resurrect / resistance. Left my whittled witness.” Here, before life begins anew, death must provide an ending, in an inseparable, necessary sequence. Carey engages with the cyclical nature of existence driven by the physical reality of the body and the ways we attempt to soften the arc of our own endings and others. Regardless of how close or loosely we hold onto our temporary lives, Carey writes: “It’s never enough: our agency, this vessel / we’re poured into, out of.”
Each poem is an inventory of life, a moment, a single day, a microscope’s lens into the nearly invisible structures that make up the whole. Carey questions desire, the forces that keep us living instead of just existing. When her mother asks, “What do you want?” she responds with:
How to begin: hunger, inherited
longing. My need to share my life,
be led. See the world
through an animal’s eyes.
It is not only her own life she begins to see here, but also life through the point of view of her dog, Max, who returns like a pet at mealtime, gently yet persistently, throughout the collection. Both Max and another dog pass away in the pages of this collection, each death a shadow that passes over and through the speaker’s eyes. Death becomes an event that is shared with acquaintances and strangers, a story passed on to share the burden of carrying the unwanted load of mortality. After all this time, after many loved ones departed, the speaker in these pages refuses to halt or stagnate, instead pausing for a moment while “breathing in the past / to breathe again.”
