e·pon·y·mous: Reviews in Conversation

In collaboration with the O,Word? podcast, e·pon·y·mous: Reviews in Conversation is a companion series where Sticky Fingers will publish a poetry review one week in advance of the e·pon·y·mous episodes going live, where DeeSoul Carson discusses the reviewed collection with the poet. Subscribe to the O, Word? Substack to stay up to date on the episodes!

Offering of Flesh & Dirt:

A Review of I.S. Jones' Debut Collection, Bloodmercy

By DeeSoul Carson

As a son of a deacon, grandson of a preacher, child of all-day Sunday services, choir rehearsals, and bedtime prayer, I grew up well-versed and unquestioning of the bible’s stories. It is incredible to me, now an adult, how easily I took some of its tales as facts without questioning their underlying logic. There was nothing to question about God’s perfect will: All that God made, did, and was is good. The fall of man was the fault of man. We were animals who did not appreciate their good fortune.

Bloodmercy takes one of those first stories, the story of the first children and the first murder, and turns it on its head. The collection is a spectacular reimagining of the relationship between Cain & Abel, an exploration of violence & desire & what is done with our hands. This entire collection, I was enamored with the richness of Jones' language, the clarity of the voices she was writing in. The landscape collection is haunted by questions of belonging, how we move through a world that shows us so little mercy — how merciful we choose or choose not to be.

In our conversation about the book and its premise, Jones has described the term “bloodmercy” as the “immutable bond between sisters, the suffocating nature of familial ties.” That dynamic becomes clear as we move through the voices of the collection: Cain’s lyricism that lives in the world of nature and the earth’s bounty, Abel’s narrative and self-discovery that occupies concerns of flesh and desire, Eve’s dramatic musings on her entrapment in the new world’s strange beauty. We never hear from Baba/Adam/God themselves, the negligent father figures who influence so much of the dynamics between the collection’s women, but their presence haunts us as much as the knowledge of what becomes of the sisters by the end of their story.

The collection opens with a poem in the voice of Cain that serves as the book’s preamble, following an offering ritual that sees the sisters sacrifice a goat to God. Despite the lyricism we will see from Cain in the collection, the poem opens with a clear declaration:

“Violence is a failure of communication.”

Indeed, so much of what transpires between the girls is the aftermath of what they can no longer say to each other, the aftermath of jealousy and secrets and desire. Cain’s eponymous poem shows us how deeply concerned and watchful she is of her younger sister, who she speaks of almost like an animal she is considering, a creature Cain dreams of following her to a merciful end.

In the first title poem, as the weather turns colder and the light of summer begins to die, we watch as Cain struggles to make sense of her sister’s distancing of herself, this younger girl she sees as her property. So much of how she views herself has become wrapped in her sister, now inextricable from herself, such that her thoughts towards her feel almost like a kind of self-destructive ideation. Her language becomes carnivorous:

“...My blood meeting

yours to become ‘cainable.’ My name eating yours to become

‘cannibal.’ Mercy at your still body becomes ‘claimable.’

Call it ‘grace’ or ‘pity,’ you my ancestry, my wife, I should

have ended you when the stakes were lower.”

Abel, on the other hand, is far different from the child we know from the story. She knows her purpose, what she has been given power over, and the space she occupies in her sister’s mind. Her language is far less lyrical, instead leaning on the strength and sharpness of her words. She sees her kin as someone to pity, taunting her, saying:

“Look at me, Cain: Baba’s most prized creation.

…O sister, praise me for the pity I have shown you”

While Cain’s section reflects on her sense of worth, who she is and isn’t in the face of God, in the shadow of her sister, Abel’s section is focused on what she does with her own desire and impulses, how she manages the blood and violence that is expected of her. What we see in these sisters is a reflection of girlhood, how girls must navigate expectations of beauty, of worth, of violence and submission. Who do we become when we refuse these expectations? Who do we become when we give in to them?

Eve serves as the adult presence in the collection: first woman, first mother, first wife. Through her, we give voice to the interiority of girls as they mature into those expectations with enough history to question them. As children, we sometimes lack the language to make sense of what we are growing up around or have to navigate, but Eve is a character that knows what she wants, and does not shy away from defiance. Through her, the collection thinks through disobedience as an act of choosing one’s self, and the sacrifices that are made — of home, of history, of comfort — for those choices to be realized.

The book ends with Abel’s voice in the second title poem, speaking much softer to her sister than in her introduction. It is in this poem she yields to their bloodmercy, the braid that binds them for as long as both of them shall live, as long as one of them is still alive to tend to it. This collection is a remarkably ambitious debut, thrusting us into a world we think we know and coloring it in ways we could not have imagined.

Listen to DeeSoul Carson in conversation with I.S. Jones on the next episode of e·pon·y·mous!