This is a really powerful collection packaged up as a beautiful AND quick read. It covers important and ever-timely topics, like racial injustice, history, the American Civil War. Its hybrid form is done so well; the poems fit so perfectly with the narrative that it is never jarring to slip back and forth.

Lauren Haldeman lives in Iowa City, where she also completed her BA and MFA, and where she currently works as a senior editor for the University of Iowa. She is incredibly well-connected in the city and its literary web. Mission Creek is already planning to project illustrations from the book all throughout downtown Iowa City at this year's festival (2022).

We are planning a tour with stops at Manassas National Park, Iowa City, Montreal, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Quebec City, and Toronto. Lauren has previously published a chapbook collaboration with Kiki Petrosino (Black Genealogy), in which she paired her illustrations with poems from Kiki that would eventually become part of White Blood. The two plan to do some of the east coast tour stops together.

A comic excerpt from this book has appeared in Poetry, and Lauren has had other work in Tin House, Iowa Review, and elsewhere.

This will be a really beautiful book. Full color. French flaps. Lauren plans to hand-draw most of the poems, as well.