Blood Wolf Moon // Red Hen Press, 2026

Elise Paschen’s sixth book of poetry, Blood Wolf Moon, weaves together heritage, language and personal narrative into a deeply moving, thoughtful collection of poems. “I was/ born in the month of the Blood Wolf Moon,” she writes in the first poem of the collection, “Heritage”. In this way, the poems are largely about what it means to exist for Paschen—the collection is a sort of origin story.

The book, which draws on multiple Osage dictionaries, becomes in many ways its own dictionary of terms and meanings, memories and generational stories. The dictionary poems at the end of the collection are some of the most moving. Written in an Osage alphabet, in a phonetic alphabet, and in English, these poems lend a unique complexity to the telling of Paschen’s heritage and personal identity. “I zigzag/ into the world/ a woman,/ a wolf.” the last dictionary poem starts, and I am left with the sense that the poems in this collection are her wolf-ness.

What I learned from these poems is (at least) two-fold. One thing has something to do with how to maintain a narrative through use of line breaks and syntax, being as clear as possible and moving through the page. The other thing has something to do with the languages of my own ancestors, how I might someday write my own dictionary poems.

Blood Wolf Moon—Read this book if you want to think about heritage in a new way.