Gloved Against Blood

Gloved Against Blood explores the fraught relationships of four generations of women against a backdrop of the patriarchal textile mills of 19th-century Lowell, Massachusetts, that were fueled by the blood and sweat of exploited mill girls and enslaved African Americans in the South. This collection speaks to family, lost love, infidelities, abandonment, and the close work, women’s work, of mending what is torn and making it like new despite the forces of inherited histories.

Cindy Veach is the author of the poetry collections Her Kind (CavanKerry Press, 2021) and Gloved Against Blood (CavanKerry Press, 2017), a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize and a Massachusetts Center for the Book “Must Read,” and the chapbook Innocents(Nixes Mate), as well as coauthor, with J. D. Scrimgeour, of the script Imprisoned! 1692, produced by the Essex National Heritage Commission. Her poems have appeared in the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, AGNI, Chicago Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Poet Lore, and Prairie Schooner, among others. She is the recipient of the Salt Hill Journal’s Philip Booth Poetry Prize (selected by Mary Ruefle) and the New England Poetry Club’s Samuel Washington Allen Poetry Prize (selected by Marilyn Nelson). www.cindyveach.com

For me, Gloved Against Blood holds the perfect image for these beautiful poems that struggle to push away received histories. From the immigrant mill girls in 19th-century Lowell, Massachusetts, to contemporary café workers who sell espresso / fifteen ways, we need to protect ourselves against hard times—against the firm eye of the needle—against forces we cannot control no matter how hard we work to sew or mend. This is an extremely fine and forceful debut.
—Susan Rich, author of Cloud Pharmacy (White Pine Press)

“For its hardness, for how it resists / splintering,” Gloved Against Blood, by Cindy Veach, with its meditations on the lives and hardships of female textile workers, demands the reader’s steady hand and unflinching gaze through braided images, sometimes lacy with memory, sometimes sharp as a needle. Loom-like, the poet’s forms use the under-over of the sentences in such a way as to bring out a cadence gold-threaded with sound—“the way a daughter // walks, a grandson shrugs— / pure plagiarism, memory muscle // turning backward forward, / not ours not theirs.” Here, the poet investigates faith—in husbands, in the company, in God—but does not arrive at easy conclusions; instead, she turns up more questions and, perhaps more importantly, the silences of those who cannot reply. Ultimately, this collection reminds us that the lives of women are not delicate, domestic trifles; it witnesses to their unyielding survival, asking us to look upon their narratives, “the spiraled remnants of their making.”
—Emilia Phillips, author of Groundspeed (University of Akron Press)

November 7, 2017
88 pp
Trade paper – 6 X 9.25
$16
ISBN  978-1-933880-64-8