Bloodmercy by Jones, I. S.

Bloodmercy (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798987585238)

Vendor: I. S. Jones
Product type: Books
Format: Paperback
$16.00
$16.00
$16.00
Subtotal: $16.00
Bloodmercy by Jones, I. S.

Bloodmercy

$16.00
Bloodmercy by Jones, I. S.

Bloodmercy

$16.00
Format: Paperback
Description
Description
x

Selected by Nicole Sealey as the winner of the 2025 APR/Honickman First Book Prize, Bloodmercy is a striking debut that reimagines the tale of Cain and Abel as sisters.

"Violence is a failure of communication" opens this book as both omen and foreground to a familial dynamic living in the wake of exile from Eden. In I.S. Jones's stunning and evocative debut collection, Cain and Abel are reimagined as sisters whose care for each other is intimate, yet fraught increasingly fraught by a smothering proximity. Their vicious rivalry for the attention of a God, negligent as a father. Parallel to this, in the wake of their bodies budding within and against the still-forming landscape, the girls must navigate the shame of Eve's sin while coming into their own sexuality. Grounded in the lush, remote natural world, enclosed by firs and redwoods, Bloodmercy follows Cain and Abel through the dense geography of girlhood into young womanhood exploring power, spite, control, sex, faith, death and man's dominion over the earth. Blurring the space between the Old Testament and the modern world, the girls gaze heavenward with their enduring questions to God. As "mercy" means "divine gift" and blood is a consecration of our bonds to each other, a "bloodmercy" is an uncloseable wound. An innate oath between sisters that binds them together in life and death. Our assumed obligation to other no matter what it costs ourselves. A love so everlasting, it suffocates. Lyrical, lush and bursting with tender imagination, Bloodmercy marks a debut to watch.

Author: I. S. Jones
ISBN-13: 9798987585238
Publisher: American Poetry Review
Language: English
Published: 09/09/2025
Pages: 88
Format: Paperback
By I. S. Jones
By I. S. Jones
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I.S. Jones is an American / Nigerian poet and editor. She holds fellowships from Hedgebrook Callaloo, The Watering Hole, Brooklyn Poets, and Bread Loaf where she was the 2023 Rona Jaffe Scholar in poetry. Her works have appeared or are forthcoming in Guernica, Washington Square Review, LA Review of Books, Prairie Schooner, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Since 2019, she has served as an editor at 20:35 Africa: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, the longest running anthology for living African poets. Currently, I.S. is a senior editor for Poetry Northwest where she runs her column, "The Legacy Suite", a three-part interview documenting the journey of writers publishing their debut poetry collections. Her chapbook Spells of My Name, selected for their Emerging Poets Series, was published with Newfound in 2021. She is the 2024-2025 Artist-In-Resident at Northwestern University with the Black Arts Consortium.

Nicole Sealey is the author of The Ferguson Report: An Erasure, an excerpt from which was awarded the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem, Ordinary Beast, finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the PEN Open Book Award, and The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named, winner of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize. Her honors include a 2023-2024 Cullman Center Fellowship from the New York Public Library, a Rome Prize in Literature from the American Academy in Rome, a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from The American Poetry Review, and fellowships from CantoMundo, Cave Canem, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Her work has appeared in various journals including The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and Poetry London. She teaches in the MFA Writers Workshop in Paris program at New York University.

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