Allison Blevins | Keeping Up

Keeping Up: poems by Allison Blevins. Number 5 in Volume Six of our Editor’s Series.

[ cover artwork by Meghan Merchant ]

Allison Blevins’ Keeping Up is praised as “a searing, formally restless elegy for the self as it fragments under the pressure of motherhood, marriage, memory, and mediated culture. These poems do not flinch—they blister.” (Angelique Zobitz)

“This book cleverly alternates fine art and episodes of Keeping Up with the Kardashians as ekphrastic inspiration. These outward reflections become laser sharp inner monologue. Allison Blevins has woven an intricate tapestry pulled together by the tension and weight of expectations Blevins renders queer motherhood and female rage with startling clarity: ‘this is the scream all women learn,‘ her lines aching with what is said and what is swallowed.” (Emily Hockaday)

Publication:  November 1, 2025 [100 copies]
25 pages
ISBN 978-1-960693-29-7
$ 12.00

Allison Blevins (she/her) is a queer disabled writer and the author of Where Will We Live if the House Burns Down?, Cataloguing Pain, Handbook for the Newly Disabled: A Lyric Memoir, Slowly/Suddenly, and five previous chapbooks. Winner of the 2024 Donald Barthelme Prize, the 2023 Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award, and the 2022 Laux/Millar Poetry Prize, Allison serves as the Publisher of Small Harbor Publishing and lives in Minnesota with her spouse and three children.

For more information visit www.allisonblevins.com.

Imagine How It Feels to Unravel

after Season 13, episode 2: “Paris”

If I can give myself anything, let it be a way into anger. My life breaks my flesh slowly apart, every word a loaded gun with no trigger.   Imagine a woman’s voice singing like a violin. Imagine the oh in the hinge of your knee between cartilage and cap, synovial fluid vibrating. Imagine teeth grinding at night, tires drifting over the sleeper lines, bone against bone the rhythm of unraveling.

              Imagine a simple cadence, people begin clapping, as if living outside the beat is unbearable, each of us a ripped page. My sternum wants to crack from the cage, to unravel. Push two fingers deep into the breast, try to numb the ache. One day, my daughters will spoil: my inner voice will become theirs, we will collect our female thoughts together like daisies: I am ugly. I am flawed. 

Imagine daughter as commodity, something raw. Imagine a factory constructing washers or brads or bearings. Imagine anything manufactured. When my daughters say yes, they will not   understand. We pass our memories through our bodies. One day, their lips will mouth yes automatically. Inside all this slowly parting flesh, I am a mother unraveling.

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