Bladesong

So often one hears the question ""What can we do?"" More often than not, it remains a question without the effort of an answer. Yet in the turbulence and terror of the French Revolution, a time much like today, when the new sacrificed the old, when man insisted on replacing God, a community of Carmelites offered the oblation of their lives for peace, not without imagined horror, anxiety, and misgiving. The nuns were expelled from their convent and had to live in four separate houses and wear secular dress. In a strange coincidence, their clothes being washed at the time of their capture, they had nothing but their habits to wear. They witnessed as a community united--in the court where they were condemned, as they traveled in the carts toward death, and as they ascended, one by one, the steps to the guillotine and asked permission to die. Ten days after their deaths, the French Revolution ended. This is the story of an ""unhushed"" Blade, a story that repeats and demonstrates again through history how courage and sacrifice triumph.

"This collection comprises a sustained meditation in poetry and prose on the sixteen Carmelites of Compiègne martyred during the French Revolution. With a lyrical focus on the nuns' inner lives, small, prescient instances of holiness and of costly courage are woven into the story of their collective tragedy 'like sparks/ spun from a wheel' ('Turning'). Beautiful, crafted, heartbreaking--Bladesong evokes a shocking historical event, but its themes and imagery also point to so much more."
--Sarah Law, editor, Amethyst Review

Ann Power is a retired faculty member from the University of Alabama. She enjoys writing historical sketches as well as poems based in the kingdoms of magical realism. Her work has appeared in Spillway, Gargoyle Magazine, The Birmingham Poetry Review, The American Poetry Journal, Dappled Things, Caveat Lector, Copperfield Review, The Ekphrastic Review, The Loch Raven Review, Halfway Down the Stairs, and other journals. In addition, two of her poems have been nominated for Best of the Net in Poetry.

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