Book Review of Elise Paschen’s “Blood Wolf Moon,” by Rey M. Rodríguez
Book Review
Blood Wolf Moon by Elise Paschen
Red Hen (2025)
By Rey M. Rodríguez
In James, Percival Everett’s National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, the character James writes, “With my pencil, I wrote myself into being. I wrote myself to here.” By doing so, James accomplishes a historic act in a world that prohibits enslaved people from writing down their stories. In Blood Wolf Moon, Elise Paschen does the same, but I argue that she reaches this bar and exceeds it in profound and important ways. James is a fictional character who teaches us how sacred the act of writing is. It is so sacred that in the story, an enslaved character is lynched for stealing a pencil.
But Paschen is not fictional. She is an Osage author who is writing her story into being with the skill and talent of a master writer who has studied the craft her whole life for the singular reason of writing herself and her people into the present. Her work is a reminder of the attempt to erase a people and their language, and it is thrilling evidence that they failed because her story and the story of her people are told with such care, love, joy, and power, employing English and, in important places, the Osage language.
Blood Wolf Moon is a remarkable achievement because it tells an intensely personal story and opens the door for an oral language to be written down in the language of its people. One can only imagine the possibilities of what is to come based on Paschen’s work. Moreover, her book should be required reading for anyone who wants to learn the complicated and violent history of the United States. Paschen's book is both an Indigenous story and an American story that we should all be aware of and study.
Elise Paschen, an enrolled member of the Osage Nation, is a poet and editor who was born and raised in Chicago. She earned a BA at Harvard University and a PhD in 20th-century British and American Literature at Oxford University, with a dissertation on the manuscripts of poet William Butler Yeats. During her time at Oxford, she co-edited Oxford Poetry. In addition to writing six books of poetry, she is an anthologist. She edited or co-edited seven poetry anthologies.
Blood Wolf Moon is divided into five sections, seemingly replicating the five acts of a play. She opens with a long poem entitled “Heritage.” It is structured on the idea of a crown of sonnets, comprised of 14 poems all interconnected. The last line of each poem repeats in the next one, almost like a paper chain connected by links. For example, Heritage I ends with the line “extinguished, our next of kin.” Heritage II commences with the same line and continues with the line, “ descended from constellations.”
What is so challenging about reviewing Paschen’s groundbreaking book is that there are so many different layers to it. Paschen is such an accomplished poet, and it is on full display in each word she uses and in each stanza she indents. However, that is not to say that craft overwhelms her storytelling. On the contrary, it only enhances it. Ultimately, her technique and craft disappear as the reader becomes fully entranced and enthralled with her poetry. One example of her brilliance is that in “Heritage,” each line of the text is indented in ways that intimate and remind the reader that her mother was a premier ballerina, so that each line is almost dancing along the page. In addition, the book has everything from the historical to the lyrical.
In “Heritage I,” I was struck by the first line because it seems so devastating: “Once I had a name/for everything I possessed, but now am silent, afraid/to trespass.” I read into this line that once she thought that she had been given the truth about her past, but that was all incomplete or a lie. Now, as she confronts the truth of her family’s and her tribe’s history, she is silent, afraid to confront the mysteries and the horror of what has happened to her, her family, and her people. There is also this idea that “once I had a name for everything I possessed” echoes to a moment when Paschen only used the English language to name things because that was all that she had. Despite her fears, she persisted in exploring her past, and, critically, she wrote it down on paper for the world to walk with her through her fears. By taking this courageous act, we find at the end of Heritage XIV that she found her true name, which she wrote in her Osage language. In a sense, Paschen ensures that the fourteen-section poem has now come full circle because now she has a name for her most important possession—her identity.
There are so many astonishing and arresting moments throughout the remaining four acts of Paschen’s book, but two that stood out for me are “Poison Tree” in Section IV and the use of the Osage language throughout the book, especially in Section V.
In an interview that I did with Paschen for Chapter House, the literary journal for the Institute of American Indian Arts, I learned that “Poison Tree” is written in the form of a ghazal (pronounced ghuzzle), an ancient Urdu Persian form. The first stanza begins, “A blood-red X marks the manchineel of ache./Little apples of death, quick meals of ache.” The form constrains the poet to specific requirements, as in this case, the word “ache” is repeated at the end of each stanza, and it is in relation to such words as “manchineel,” “meal,” “conceal,” “surreal,” and “tree.” At the end of the poem, there is a Radif where the writer of the poem returns and says, “Strange passion, steal the ache.”
Despite the complexity of the form, Paschen succeeds in enlightening the reader and adding to the beauty of her message. Until this poem, I didn't know anything about the manchineel, the most poisonous tree on the planet. Paschen, in my reading of the poem, ties its danger to her experience growing up when she writes, “An only child, I disappeared behind the page.” The line harkens back to the first sentence in “Heritage.” The stanza continues, “my mother mastered shadows to conceal the ache.” There's this danger of the tree that can kill if we don’t understand its essence. The poem also talks about open wounds. “My mother dabbed iodine, salt air, she said, will heal the ache.” I read into this to mean the need for people to heal and find ways to get through the grief of losing those we love. Despite the pain, it is important to keep on living and resist through the act of living.
But what is most revelatory of this extraordinary book of poetry is the use of the Osage language. The book itself is an act of resistance and reclamation against a genocidal past and an important act of literary sovereignty that the poet and others may build upon to give life and meaning to the Osage people and, in turn, humanity. In Section V, Paschen employs Osage dictionaries to create her poetry. These dictionaries were all transcriptions of Osage elders speaking their language.
In a moment, when our country regularly bans books and seems to be afraid to confront its colonial and genocidal past, Paschen invites us, through her example, to take the courageous act of finding our name as Americans and write ourselves into being. Who are we in all of our complexity and not in a whitewashed and incomplete way, but in all of our fullness? Blood Wolf Moon stands as a testament that, as a country, we will only be complete and resilient enough to confront the challenges of our future if we examine our past, atone for it, and find our true name.
Rey M. Rodríguez is a writer, advocate, and attorney. He lives in Pasadena, California. He is working on a novel set in Mexico City and a poetry book inspired by a prominent nonprofit in East LA. He has attended the Yale Writers' Workshop multiple times and Palabras de Pueblo workshop once. He participated in Story Studio's Novel in a Year Program. He is a first-year fiction creative writing student at the Institute of American Indian Arts' MFA Program. His poetry is published in Huizache. His other interviews and book reviews can be found at La Bloga, Chapter House's Storyteller’s Corner, Full Stop, Pleiades Magazine, and the Los Angeles Review. He is a graduate of Cornell, Princeton, and UC Berkeley.
