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Selected by Nicole Sealey as the winner of the 2025 APR/Honickman First Book Prize, Bloodmercy is a must-read debut that reimagines the tale of Cain and Abel as sisters.
"Violence is a failure of communication" opens this book as an omen and foregrounds a family exiled from Eden. In I.S. Jones's stunning and evocative debut collection, Cain and Abel are reimagined as sisters whose care for each other becomes increasingly fraught--the siblings vicious as they vie for the attention of a negligent father. Parallel to this, their bodies budding within and against the still-forming landscape, the girls navigate the shame of Eve's sin while coming into their own sexuality.
Grounded in the remote natural world, enclosed by firs and redwoods, Bloodmercy follows Cain and Abel through the dense geography of girlhood into young womanhood. Along the way, they discover the limits of power and control, spite and sex, faith and death, and man's dominion over the earth. Found in the space between the Old Testament and the modern world, the girls gaze heavenward and pose enduring questions to God. Lyrical, lush, and bursting with tender imagination, Bloodmercy marks a debut to watch.
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.