Blood Wolf Moon

Author: Elise Paschen

Publisher: Red Hen Press (2025)

In her riveting sixth poetry collection, Blood Wolf Moon, Elise Paschen explores the story lines of her Osage heritage. The core of the book grapples with a dark period of American history, “The Reign of Terror,” when outsiders murdered individual members of the Osage for their oil headrights. Paschen searches her cultural past and family history in poems about the land, ancestors, childhood, loss, nature, transformation, flight, and language. In this cinematic book, she builds drama in overlapping narratives, reinventing ways to approach the line on the page. Described by poet Timothy Donnelly as “one of today’s most formally astute poets,” Paschen opens Blood Wolf Moon with the long poem, “Heritage,” a bracelet of crown poems, then shifts registers to formal poems and prose sequences. Poet and editor Esther Belin calls the concluding poems with their use of Osage language, “significant leaps into literary sovereignty.” Blood Wolf Moon captivates with its emotional intensity and unrelenting quest for the translation of identity. It’s a book you can’t put down.