Bloodroom is a howling, scorching debut collection of deftly formatted poetry–circling, and delicately probing, themes of familial debt, legacy, obligation, and the matriline. Through an index of past wounds and inherited scars, the speaker bleeds their histories together with the slow erosion of nostalgia. These poems offer an incisive and scalding interrogation of gender, yet are often unbearably tender-a swirling emulsion of grief and anger poured into an intricately technical and beautifully challenging mold. Each piece draws out a tragic, cyclical song of love and loss, resentment and admiration, as though drawing poison from a wound. Bancroft's writing is meditative, cleansing, and compulsively readable: recounting a feminine childhood transformed into something monstrous until seen through a new lens. Bloodroom is a plea to identity, to the process of searching for purpose and of seeking certainty in a broken world.
"Do you identify with any of the above terminology? Occasionally. Some days they feel appropriate. Others, I resent these tools of our language. I reject and embrace, synchronously."
Praise from other poets:
"Kay E. Bancroft makes me want to be brave—to be able to watch horror movies with my eyes open and to shake up language until only sincerity remains. Get ready to experience Bloodroom, a work that is part poetry collection, part museum exhibit, and part science experiment. You will walk away from this book a whole new creature." –Paige Lewis, author of Space Struck
"Kay Bancroft’s deft debut Bloodroom is brim with glimmering sorrows: estrangement from a m____r, grief for a dead grandm____r, and traumas passed through matrilineal lines. This book teems with invention, weaving lyric in and out of forms archival, visual, redactive, and playful. When I say playful, I mean this is dead serious, play to keep alive, to keep from falling apart..." –Diana Khoi Nguyen, author of Root Fractures
