Mixed Blood Author:Marilyn Bates Marilyn Bates attributes her love for the outdoors, with which she begins this collection, to those quiet afternoons of shelling peas under the osage orange tree with her grandmother or digging in her own small patch next to her father's garden. Their psyches, delicately linked, like roots beneath the soil, bear fruit in this poetry. Most ... more »painful of all these experience is the illness which linked her to her father and distanced her from her sister as a child. Her disease lies palpably under all of this work as she speaks of those with whom her blood is mixed, both literally and psychologically.« less