‘Blood Transparencies: An Autobiography in Verse’‘ is a brutally honest narrative of coming-of-age in a unique American family. Told in a series of poetic vignettes, it details life with a father who believes John Muir’s words more essential than the Bible, often leading his “tribe” on harsh quests into America’s wildernesses. The tale is both humorous and heart breaking. Imagine Odysseus returned from WWII to teach his son the subtle art of bone breaking before sharing hot cocoa and opera. This is a family as at ease with nurturing abandoned wild animals as around a campfire rapt to ancestral stories of cannibalism. Throughout the book there is an occasional photographic relic, or Neolithic scrawl to memorialize the breadth of this human story. There are echoes here too, like the “transparencies” of the title, of mythology and tall tales, an oral tradition transcendent of the printed page. “Blood Transparencies” is a stunningly fresh glance back, far back, from whence we’ve all come.