The Gospel of the Bleeding Woman (Point Loma Press, 2013) imagines a life for an interesting, unnamed biblical character: the bleeding woman who touches Jesus in three of the gospel accounts. The first half of this poetry collection is biblical/historical fiction; the second half, after the healing touch, moves into the realm of speculative fantasy (because faith is a strange, strange thing).

This poetry chapbook is available from the author (US or international; shipping included), through the publisher’s website, and on Bookshop and Amazon.

“High energy, compressed, unashamed, daring and delightfully inventive, Katie Manning’s Gospel takes on an old ritually enforced belief in woman’s blood as unclean, unholy. Brief biblical reference to the healing of a nameless bleeding woman becomes Nura (“light”), resurrected through the miracle of text becoming memory in a living woman, contemporary in her fearless candor, her ironies, her sense that we can still be healed by a love that we do not pretend to understand.”
—Eleanor Wilner, author of Tourist in Hell and The Girl with Bees in Her Hair

“With precision and vigor, Katie Manning steps into biblical history to retrieve the story of the woman with an issue of blood. What great conjecture. What a solid collection of varying form and tone woven with a strong voice. Manning’s voice is so accurate, it sounds like it’s straight from the woman’s mouth.”
—Diane Glancy, author of It Was Then and Stories of the Driven World

“Katie Manning’s The Gospel of the Bleeding Woman is technically brilliant and the poems coalesce as more than the sum of their parts. The “modern” section is risky, but the risk pays off—I feel a spiritual joy and literary destiny here.”
—Rick Hill, author of No Hands and We’re All From Somewhere Else