BLOOD ORBITS is a series of poems and prose poems exploring various conceptualizations of history both as a generative principle of meaning and as particular contexts and events through which we shape our subjectivities. In language that is richly musical and startlingly surreal, these poems interrogate and confront narratives that encode oppression, violence, and dishonesty, both the "grand narratives" which structure our place in history as well as the stories that we as individuals tell ourselves to make sense of our lives in their dailiness. The events confronted in these poems are refracted through various consciousnesses using speaking voices that emerge from a whole spectrum of narrators, some reliable, some not, some linear in the way their language operates, some not. These events include the years of the Terror after the French Revolution, the opening up of the American West, the early exploration of the Arctic, and various colonial adventures. In writing that is at once...