Flawed beauty, fragility of relationships, mystery beneath surface, class differences, race – all find their way into various pieces in this collection of related essays that explore how growing up in Joliet, Illinois, in the late sixties and early seventies shaped the author as a person and a poet. The book is deeply informed by the aging, industrial, working class town. "The Francine Tolf we encounter in Joliet in My Blood, her memoir of growing up in the sixties and seventies in that Midwestern city dwarfed by Chicago, is someone at first almost too familiar: a girl who doesn’t want to take piano lessons, who more than once failed to stand up to bullies, who had to endure mean-spirited grown-ups at a department store summer job, who longed to be popular but never quite made it. What rescues both this collection and its author from otherwise unmitigated regret is Tolf’s poetic sensibility and human sympathy. Her characters transcend stereotype and deliver a poignancy at the hand of a writer who has chosen conviction and compassion over popularity. Joliet in My Blood displays through its personal reminiscence one woman’s journey towards a kind of courage that turns regret away from self-pity and instead fills its pages with a bittersweet affection for a flawed and imperfectly beautiful world, first encountered in Joliet, Illinois, but just as much a story for all of our lives, wherever we might have grown up or now live. This unassuming little book ultimately delivers, then, a chance to read a translation of the ordinary into something vital and even miraculous." - Joe Benevento (The Monsignor’s Wife, “Tough Guys Don’t Write”)