Review of Luke Wortley’s Shared Blood by David John Baer McNicholas

Shared Blood is a 2023 full length book of poetry by Luke Wortley. While reading it, I was reminded of the sinisterness of shadow puppets and that my father keeps a part of himself locked in a tiny metal box, and that he never shares it with anyone. I’m used to thinking of poetry as having a defined, if permeable, boundary between the speaker of the poem and the author of the poem. Shared Blood worries that distinction. This aspect locates the book between genres. Sure, it is prose poetry, and beautifully written. More than that though is the sense of the historical, the non-fiction.. This is a story about rupture that never ends; the myth of closure gets taken out behind the woodshed. The exposed nerves being crossed over again and again in a ritual fashion, trying perhaps to deaden the afflicted spots and enliven the joyful ones.

            Frustration comes across through impossibility in Wortley’s poetry. An emotionally absent relationship and the long compounded ambiguous loss cause fractures of identity to break off into pocket universes. Pockets which must be emptied and sorted to find their wholeness, as with the speaker in Medicine, who cherishes the new prescription in his veins which “soothes my wife, reinvigorates my son, who/ now knows which daddy he’s going to get” (page 46, lines 8-9). Wortley has a gift for the absurd, which he uses to embody a struggle to bleed and live from a point of severance. These short blocks of mostly prose sometimes read like flash fables. In “The King and the Prince” I am reminded of the afternoon my own father surprised me with a gift: a plastic grocery bag full of his old socks. The way the absurdities of a dysfunctional relationship breach fiction and become reality is captured so well, that I could not say for certain where the exaggeration begins, and plain truth ends.

            Wortley is a vulnerable writer. His speaker shows a deep consciousness of duty to and love for his family, and his insecurities regarding a world that is overwhelmingly out of his control. In “Near Miss,” on page six, the speaker describes the nightmare of being responsible to hold and care for a helpless infant son when one has so deeply forgone feeling held oneself. There is a father, and an infant who refuses to be held. The child escapes and falls, disappears, then reappears, then disappears again, while the father is drawn away from the comfort and safety of the home, first to a beach, then offshore, swimming to regain ground. Wortley brings seascape alive through the details of “little crustaceans picking their way across the sand” and “Salt ghosting the tongue” (lines 7-9). The shift of “the sky changing to/ bloody hues on the breeze” (lines 12-13) creates ominous beauty within his anxiety. The alienation of the experience is turned to a worried longing as the speaker swims toward shore hearing his “wife’s voice on the swells,/ calling out to ask what’s the matter” (lines 15-16).

            Shared Blood is a thorough exploration and excavation of the relationship between a father and son. The father is incapable of seeing the son, or much beyond his own carefully curated feed of sports highlights. He makes awkward attempts to suture the son to his new family. The specter of a “new mother” intrudes into text through the sickening voice of the father begging for acceptance of her as “grandma.” The son becomes a father and bears forward a dangerous cargo of disappointment that he desperately seeks to ground and disperse before it can cling on to the new young family he has started. One hopes that the speaker’s embodiment of these feelings and fears acts as a spell of protection.

            This book was not easy for me to read. Wortley’s emotional curiosity demands that his speaker charges into the uncomfortable darkness of the specific disappointment of a Euro-American man continuously coming to terms with an emotionally absent, family abandoning father. I’m familiar with this dusky walk. On this journey, it may comfort some readers to feel heard by Wortley’s prose, others may find themselves faced with a deferred reckoning, “The father skulking away,/ defeated and burning with a heart lit on fire, horns ablaze. filled/ with the song of his son catching in his mouth” (page 62, lines 13-15). Taken in by Wortley’s sensual telling and his reach beyond the surface of things, I consumed my own discomfort. There is a loneliness to the speaker that comes across as fundamentally protective, as though he could isolate and destroy parts of himself likely to infect his family, and those quarantined parts feel the pain of their exclusion. 

            Wortley is a gifted poet taking on an extremely personal project with Shared Blood. The reward for the reader is a kind of uncomfortable solace, feeling heard, seen, and perhaps held by his words. Moreover, the text strongly implies questions. If ambiguous loss never dissipates, how do we live with it? How do we live while bleeding out? Like the absurd koans of Wortley’s speaker, these questions and the structure of the poems/stories they are presented in trouble linear structures of progress narratives. They point at rhizomatic realms of possibility, how nodes in conflict can be nodes in relationship, how communication exceeds transmission of facts or lies, how ignoring the emotional labor of being in relationship creates sickening ripples in all directions, and most importantly: how healing, a responsibility and a choice of the person who can see the injury, does not mean erasure of the wound. Of all the absurd things we regularly believe, wholeness exclusive of the fractured is one of the most destructive.

To order your copy of Shared Blood: https://gnashingteethpublishing.com/books/shared-blood-by-luke-wortley/