Bloodmercy

Bloodmercy

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. Praise for Bloodmercy “Jones is a poet I look up to for several reasons, a primary one being her attentiveness towards and fearless relationship with language. Between the ancestral and the modern, between angel song and curses, Bloodmercy challenges the reader to question the boundaries of language and what it allows us to do.”— Shlagha Borah, Rumpus “I.S. Jones is an important new voice in poetry.”— Charles Rammelkamp, Compulsive Reader “An original and robust new take on Cain and Abel.”— Rebecca Morgan Frank, Lit Hub “Reinterpreting Cain and Abel as sisters, the poems in this very impressive debut have the fearsome, violent, musical force of myth. . . . As a series they form a sustained engagement with the idea of power—power we succumb to and power we claim—and triangulate a kind of hybrid space both real and allegorical, in a time both present and eternal-past.”— Elisa Gabbert, New York Times , "Best Poetry of 2025" 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.