"The anniversary of another pandemic spring prompts reflection; the juxtaposition of new buds and sun against a background of mind-breaking loss—in the background, if we're lucky enough to not have experienced it directly. Lucky or not, the ability to process our many griefs has been atomized. Into this blown-apart space comes Dantiel Moniz's debut collection; fully assured and, true to its title, packing heat, profoundly embodied. This is a ferociously alive book about death in all its gradations—the extinctions of intimate worlds constructed between friends and siblings, the puncturing of self-illusion by the swift knife of circumstance, the passing of loved ones into physical and emotional realms where we can't access them. In her meticulous inventory of our failures of care for one another and our fumbling efforts to mend those breaches, she presents a taxonomy of what is mournable, and its converse: what calls us to stay in the world we've made, however painful it may be to inhabit."
Publisher Grove Press
Publication Date 2021-02-02
Section New Hardcover - Fiction / All Staff Suggestions / Fiction Suggestions / Lauren A.
Format Hardcover
ISBN 9780802158154
“A gorgeous debut” (Lauren Groff) from Dantiel W. Moniz, one of the most exciting discoveries in today’s literary landscape, Milk Blood Heat depicts the sultry lives of Floridians in intergenerational tales that contemplate human connection, race, womanhood, inheritance, and the elemental darkness in us all.
A livewire debut from Dantiel W. Moniz, one of the most exciting discoveries in today's literary landscape, Milk Blood Heat depicts the sultry lives of Floridians in intergenerational tales that contemplate human connection, race, womanhood, inheritance, and the elemental darkness in us all. Set among the cities and suburbs of Florida, each story delves into the ordinary worlds of young girls, women, and men who find themselves confronted by extraordinary moments of violent personal reckoning. These intimate portraits of people and relationships scour and soothe and blast a light on the nature of family, faith, forgiveness, consumption, and what we may, or may not, owe one another.
A thirteen-year-old meditates on her sadness and the difference between herself and her white best friend when an unexpected tragedy occurs; a woman recovering from a miscarriage finds herself unable to let go of her daughter—whose body parts she sees throughout her daily life; a teenager resists her family’s church and is accused of courting the devil; servers at a supper club cater to the insatiable cravings of their wealthy clientele; and two estranged siblings take a road-trip with their father’s ashes and are forced to face the troubling reality of how he continues to shape them.
Wise and subversive, spiritual and seductive, Milk Blood Heat forms an ouroboros of stories that bewitch with their truth, announcing the arrival of a bright new literary star.
