<DIV><B>“Katie Ford’s is a finely-wrought lyrical beauty, a poetry of detail and care, but she has set it within an epic arc.” —</B><I><B>Poetry</B><BR><BR></I><I>I lie still, play dead, am delivered decree:<BR>our daughter weighs seven hundred dimes,<BR>paperclips, teaspoons of sugar,<BR>this child of grams<BR>for which the good nurse<BR>laid out her studies<BR>as a coin purse<BR>into which our tiny wealth clinked,<BR>our daughter spilling almost<BR>to the floor.<BR></I>—from “Of a Child Early Born”<BR><BR>In Katie Ford’s third collection, she sets her music into lyrics wrung from the world’s dangers. <I>Blood Lyrics</I> is a mother’s song, one seared with the knowledge that her country wages long, aching wars in which not all lives are equal. There is beauty imparted, too, but it arrives at a cost: “Don’t say it’s the beautiful / I praise,” Ford writes. “I praise the human, / gutted and rising.”</DIV>