Blood, Love and Boomerangs

Jo-Anne McBride is a renewable resource specialist in Vancouver, B.C.

This brilliant collection of poems is deeply sensual. The textured paper
of rich cream is perfect for the rough drawings that, for the most part,
appear on the left page with a poem on the right. The typeface and
layout draw the reader in, and there, in each poem, are more delights
for the senses.

There are colors like a “neon Nagasaki,” “choke-cherry red” and
“black-and-white photographs,” and movement that travels from page
to page; “subway tango,” “uncoiling,” “acrobatic effort,”
and “sink or swim or float face down.”

In exploring passion and lust, Jenkins uses sound and taste and short
sharp images that linger in the memory. She writes of modern settings
and of mathematical questions, but the explorations are of the uses (and
misuses) of love and pain, longing and lust. Personal and passionate,
these poems are to be read, savored, and reread.