S. Preston Duncan

Your death would make a great song. Let me help you.

BLOOD

ALLUVIUM

Parlyaree Press

The debut full-length poetry collection from s. Preston Duncan

Blood Alluvium is a séance in free verse, lighting candles off the tension between Duncan’s Ashkenazi Jewish and Appalachian-Gael heritage, measuring breath by the fragile stillness between trauma and music. It is a cartography of grieving charted as a process of transmutation. It struggles with identity, God (and goddesses), and the police. Through moments of incantatory transcendence and the rushed wallowing of modernity, this collection consults the ancients, brushes up against nondualism, invokes the faded tartan of mythology, and ultimately makes a decision.

Decidedly Southern, lyric, and ritualistic, Blood Alluvium reaches for the universal, sheltering a sense of interconnectedness within the hooded growl of individuality, and harmony between apparently incompatible polarities.

“This collection has been built to carry bodies and if the question is do I have the hands for it then the answer is an absolute affirmative. A stunning debut of confidence and craft, smooth as olives, rich in texture, thought and text…”

-Damien B Donnelly

Editor-in-Chief

The Storms, a journal of poetry, prose and visual art

Dublin, Ireland

“It is impossible not to be affected by the collection’s emotional truths, dazzling and penetrating imagery, and unremitting and sonorous music that runs throughout.

Some collections impact you emotionally, others leave you in awe at their craft - this collection does both...”

-Anna Saunders

CEO, Cheltenham Poetry Festival

Author, The Prohibition of Touch (Indigo Dreams, 2022)

“If you're ever worried that poetry is dying or already in the ground we stand on, you are obviously not reading the work of S. Preston Duncan...”

-Ryan Kent

Author, Everything Is On Fire: Selected Poetry 2014-2021 and the album Dying Comes With Age (Rare Bird Lit)

Richmond, Virginia

“In this achingly lyric debut full-length collection, Duncan tackles no less than creation, God, grief,

death & what follows with a poignancy that keeps the reader turning pages, swallowing poems like

pomegranate seeds, one after the next. Deeply layered images carry us into the stream where

memory and vision merge, where “thunder is pulled off the world like a sheet from fitful dreaming.”

With a lens of disparate mythologies, Duncan, like any good ferryman, brings us through the bitter

to faith and sometimes back again, leaving us loath that the journey be over. (“And yet, /says the

river, And yet.”)”

Joanna S. Lee

Author of Dissections;

Poet Laureate of Richmond, Virginia

S. Preston Duncan poetry book author photo on beach in Ireland

“Reading [Duncan’s] poems today I had the feeling of having asked (and received) an autograph from starlight.”

-Tom Robbins

S. Preston Duncan is a leathercrafter and death doula in Richmond, Virginia. He is the author of the limited risograph-printed pamphlet The Sound in This Time of Being (BIGWRK, 2020), about which novelist Tom Robbins said, “Reading [these] poems today I had the feeling of having asked (and received) an autograph from starlight.” Lost Arcana, his recent collaboration with artist De Santis, offers a meditative experience of poetry and art through a reimagined tarot deck of reconstructed chants and oracles.

Duncan’s poetry has been commissioned by The Peace Studio, nominated for Best of the Net, shortlisted for the Art of Creative Unity Award, translated into Chinese by Poetry Lab Shanghai, and appeared in dozens of journals and anthologies including [PANK], Poetry Bus, The Storms, HAD, Clarion, Free State Review, and Image Journal.

More work from S. Preston duncan