Stained

In the poem “she says that we should call my mother,” Sheree La Puma writes: “no one but god knows why warm blood seeps / onto bare skin.” To write about menstruation is to question and commune with all that is cyclical, to consider the body’s ancient and admirable insistence on renewal. In this brilliant anthology, writers explore their own connections to the natural world and to society, blurring lines between body and Earth, mother and daughter, country and womb. This inspired and important collection of writing invites us to acknowledge the shared power, grief, and tenderness inherent in our experiences of menstruation. It gives voice to both our organic, physical selves and our spiritual, human experiences, blazing a path for further discourse and reflection.

—Joan Kwon Glass, author of NIGHT SWIM (Diode Editions, 2022)

Stained is a brilliant collection of diverse voices that illuminates a bodyscape both intimately personal and universally experienced by half the human race. These essays, stories, and poems resonate with the hopes, disappointments, shame, pride, humor, and metaphors our natural cycles encompass. Within these pages every reader will find their own story.

—Carol Cassella, author of Oxygen and other novels

Stained is centuries overdue—from under the cloak of shadow and taboo, this anthology sings a multifaceted womb-bearer chorus, a raw and liberating (wo)manifesto on menses. To praise the blood, to scream its pains, to moon-howl and swim in its rising tides, to warpaint each other in its earth-rust hues as we warrior for autonomy, to mourn the babies, to heal the bodies, to quench the burning, to carry the loss of possible futures, to deify the cellular mystery we hold—this writing names it all in the most glorious, visceral, and unflinching way. I am changed after reading this collection of voices from all over the world saying, in both harmony and dissonance, that this blood, this blood, this blood is the clotted dark fabric that connects us all.

—Kai Coggin, author of Mining for Stardust, Incandescent, and Wingspan

It would be impossible for me to overstate how important—and how very necessary—this anthology is. From blessing to betrayal, from celebrated to cursed to censored, from a long-awaited confirmation to a complete contradiction of identity, the works in this anthology show the full spectrum of the experience of menstruation in stunning, brave, and beautiful ways. This is the anthology I’ve needed all my life.

—Emma Bolden, author of The Tiger and the Cage: A Memoir of a Body in Crisis

Not unlike the sea, blood is often unpredictable and unruly in its arrival. Many of us with bodies that bleed found ourselves on the early cusp of adulthood prematurely; to bleed meant we were “unclean” before the eyes of God; our own fathers stopped hugging us once our periods started. Stained is a robust, amalgamation of voices across, race, age, gender, faiths, and traditions. Governed by an interconnected system of 14 colors and adjacent images—Fig, Quicksand, Clot, Puce, Bruise, Scab, Strawberry Moon, and Siren, to name a few—Stained is an anthology that insists on the language of reimagination, reclamation, and above all freedom. The poems and stories here which make the sum of Stained are elegant, visceral, and exacting in their execution while also refusing a facile rendering of the body’s elusive machinery. Here, the editors Rachel Neve-Midbar & Jennifer Saunders curate for us a rich body of work that was once considered “taboo” to speak aloud.

—I.S. Jones author of Spells of My Name

What happens when the language of menstruation is returned to us from the patriarchal imagination, unsteeped from the male gaze that equates periods with being both fuckable and unclean? Stained: An Anthology of Writing about Menstruation is an urgent response to this question, reminding me of what Cecilia Vicuña writes in in Read Thread: The Story of the Red Thread, “no one ever paints menstruation, or shitting, because they are idiots. can there be anything more beautiful than those red threads of blood?” Each poem and essay in this gorgeous anthology returns us to the viscous knowing of our bodies while resisting the tropes of misogyny that devalue and stigmatize our vitality. Under the shadow of a culture that grows more hostile to bodily autonomy every day, Stained is a battle cry, a vibrant clot, reminding us that our understanding and relationship to our cycle is not just a political act, it is necessary to our survival. It is the thread that leads us to our wildness, a reminder that we are animal and cosmic, that our lifeforce is both: “first blood is the heart’s overflow, my earthy inheritance,” and “A ceremonious sprig of bloodshot maroon, to tell us we will live beyond those who wish us gone.” As Ross Gay Writes in “Unclean. Make Me,” won’t you join me and “Fill your lungs/ with birth’s florid shadow. This is the common dream of the living/ and dead: not only to meet/ the maker, but to taste its sweet. Even God/ should know this.”

—Kendra DeColo, author of I Am Not Trying To Hide My Hungers From The World

Stained is a chronicle of the experience of menstruation: the joyous, the ravaging, the powerful, the embarrassing, the hope, the disappointment, the pain, the fecundity, the dissonance, the passion. If you’ve ever felt alone, you’ll find someone in this generous anthology who’ll tell you that you’re not. All contemporary voices. All contending with or celebrating that primal blood!

—Ellen Bass, author of Indigo

Stained is a look at the taboo of menstruation, from those who have lived through the first blood to the onset of menopause. The chapters are divided by the many colors of blood: Strawberry, Crimson, Cayenne, Fig and Siren, the colors that bind us to one another and the earth, the blood from which we spring. Women everywhere will be grateful to read these poems.

—Dorianne Laux author Only As the Day Is Long: New and Selected Poems