White, Randy: Blood Transparencies

Blue Oak Press, paperback

Publication Date: June 30, 2016

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Blood Transparencies: An Autobiography in Verse is a brutally honest narrative of coming-of-age in a unique American family. Told in a series of poetic vignettes it details life with a father who believes John Muir's words more essential than the Bible often leading his "tribe" on harsh quests into America's wildernesses. The tale is both humorous and heart breaking. Imagine Odysseus returned from WWII to teach his son the subtle art of bone breaking before sharing hot cocoa and opera. This is a family as at ease with nurturing abandoned wild animals as around a campfire rapt to ancestral stories of cannibalism. Throughout the book there is an occasional photographic relic or Neolithic scrawl to memorialize the breadth of this human story. There are echoes here too like the "transparencies" of the title of mythology and tall tales an oral tradition transcendent of the printed page. Blood Transparencies is a stunningly fresh glance back far back from whence we've all come.

Randy White a California writer and educator has won several writing awards including the Bazzanella Literary Award for poetry. His work has appeared in Sulfur From These Hills: Stories and Poems of The American West News From Native California and other magazines and anthologies. His book-length poem Motherlode / La Veta Madre written while still a teenager was influenced by ethnopoetic theory and described by historian Cornel Lengyel as "a multi-dimensional documentary &hellip one of the finest celebrations of California since 1776."

His simple lyrical style most notably in Blood Transparencies: An Autobiography in Verse masks strata of neo-tribalist philosophy mythology and ancestral storytelling. The writing is innovative and genre bending drawing comparisons with Derek Walcott and Anne Carson. "White is a story teller his poems enact a timeless ceremony of creation as they wrest images from a past and reassemble them in a master poet's imagination" notes the introduction.