How to Draw Blood from a Stone

by Priscila Uppal

Weaving deftly through life, love and power, Priscila Uppal's poems reveal remarkable maturity and a wide range. Weaving deftly through life, love and power, Priscila Uppal's poems reveal remarkable maturity and a wide range. Tight, disciplined language brings mythology, religion and the power of the supernatural into ordinary everyday life. Bypassing youthful sentimentality, she goes straight for the core of life and death. How to Draw Blood from a Stone is a stunning debut.

88 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 1998

About the author

Priscila Uppal was a Canadian poet, novelist, and playwright. poet, academic, and professor of Humanities and English at the undergraduate and graduate levels at York University. She was also a member of the Board of Directors of the Toronto Arts Council. Her creative and academic interests frequently intersected and she has published work that explores the tensions and dynamics between women (particularly in closed societies: schools, nunneries), the nature of human violence, sexuality (including infertility), multicultural clashes (ethnic, religious, geographical), revisionist mythmaking (classical myth, biblical myth, historical figures), illness (physical, psychological, cultural), mourning rituals and the expression of grief (towards individuals, communities, abstract concepts), the world of readers and the dangers and benefits of reading and the imagination, the world of sport and sport aesthetics, as well as the nature of the artistic process, among other things.