Mud, Blood, and Ghosts

“An exquisite mosaic of the cruel and haunting complexities of family, race, property, and political power in the American West. Carefully researched, Mud, Blood, and Ghosts is a brave and moving book.”—Avery F. Gordon, author of Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination

“An outstanding, genre-bending family memoir. . . . Written with the prowess of a scholar and full of the insightfulness and precision of a poet, Mud, Blood, and Ghosts takes us simultaneously back to the nineteenth-century family origins of this story and into our turbulent present, where the urgent beating of land taken reverberates aloud, reminding us of the structural inequality of this country. Carr visits with ghosts and delivers their truth: the past is never the past. The future, if there is one, is up to us. Frankly: a must-read.”—Cristina Rivera Garza, distinguished professor of Hispanic studies and creative writing at the University of Houston

“Julie Carr, in her panoramic exhumation and exposé of the ties—the roots—that bind, precariously and profoundly, the present to the past, is, as it turns out, the ghost jumping on her great-grandfather’s bed, rustling his blankets, keeping his life—and history, for the future—unquiet, unable to rest. Mud, Blood, and Ghosts—transdisciplinary biography as reappropriation—is not only the title of this book, but precisely what it is made of.”—Brandon Shimoda, author of The Grave on the Wall