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
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
