Gloved Against Blood by Cindy Veach

Gloved Against Blood by Cindy Veach 

From the book jacket: “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.” 

The book is divided into three sections: Community, Blood from my Finger, and Now I Must Forget and includes a small notes section that credits lines taken from the letters and interviews of mill women and factory regulation literature as well as inspiration notes.  

The poems themselves vary in their construction, but are always paying close attention to sound and structure. They are not formal, but are metered,  rhythmic as a loom would be, or “as the factory bells rang / come and done .” 

Veach deals in both the personal and the persona in this collection; the confessional poems delve into Veach’s family history, which of course, is part of the larger picture, of American history and the histories of the textile mills, and as the blurb from the book jacket alludes, Veach is paying special attention to how those histories are passed down from “great-grandmother, grandmother, mother.”  

The non-confessional poems are at times persona poems, taking the stance of mill women, either as individuals, or as a collective voice, and are at other times history poems, giving the mill women their own space to “speak” within the work in their own words, plucked from various sources and italicized as a means of acknowledgment, and though the poems read in some sense as if they could be a single poem start-to-finish, they stand alone without dispute, as if each poem is a tea rose cross-stitched into a handkerchief, or the single square scene of a nine-patch quilt, or a course article of lowells.  

Learn more at the artist’s website: https://www.cindyveach.com/