Blade by Blade

Blade by Blade is an unflinching field journal of grief, loss, and discovery set against the California wilderness.

Danusha Laméris’s third book, Blade by Blade, is a book of hungers: Hunger for the bright glare of poppies, for the hidden name of the beloved, for the cracked continental edge, for all we keep in ＂the heart’s farthest chambers.＂ Seeking a way back to joy following the deaths of her son and brother, the poet finds wonder in the furred legs of a caterpillar, in egrets, elephants, and elk, solace in the seagull’s speckled egg. Here we taste a longing to kiss in the dark corner of the gym, to leap into a volcano’s molten fire, to be unraveled, undone thread by thread, made one with all things. Microscopic and tidal, earthquake and fire-prone, Blade by Blade thrives in the underbrush of human emotion. These poems are luminous missives tossed on the wind asking us to re-enter the world we’ve forsaken, to set foot, as if for the first time, on the green earth and begin again.

Danusha Laméris, a poet and essayist, was raised in Northern California, born to a Dutch father and Barbadian mother. Her first book, The Moons of August (2014), was chosen by Naomi Shihab Nye as the winner of the Autumn House Press Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the Milt Kessler Book Award. Some of her work has been published in The Best American Poetry, The New York Times, Orion, and The American Poetry Review. Her second book, Bonfire Opera (University of Pittsburgh Press), was a finalist for the 2021 Paterson Poetry Award and recipient of the Northern California Book Award in Poetry. She is currently on the faculty of Pacific University’s low residency MFA program. She co-founded The Hive Poetry Collective, a radio show, podcast, and event hub in Santa Cruz, California, where she was the 2018-2020 Poet Laureate, and co-leads the HearthFire Writing Community and Poetry of Resilience.