Bloodtide: A New Holiday in Homage to Horseshoe Crabs

by Eli Nixon

An illustrated guide to celebrating alternative futures today! Second Edition. Cardboard sculpting how-to, karaoke songbook, naturedrag theorization, 450-million-year-long love letter to horseshoe crabs, field guide to a different future--BLOODTIDE proposes exactly what we need in a form we never a new kind of holiday in homage to the ancient Horseshoe Crab. BLOODTIDE is drawn from the author's own need for new cultural practices and extended as an offering for anybody to use with hopes of contributing to collective liberation. It attempts queer futurity, without mythologies of settler innocence and with sustained recognition that time extends through our recent ones and ancient. BLOODTIDE promotes horizontalist structure-building practices through pageantry, crabaoke, cardboard sculpting, feasting and other hands-on, locally oriented, commemorative & survivalist practices. BLOODTIDE posits that homage and attention to horseshoe crabs might further all repair efforts and other insufficient necessities for our collective and individual healing/transformation. "It is radical, it is wise, it is alive."--Agnes Borinsky "BLOODTIDE gifts us a river to wander down where we can drift away from the bullshit through the fugitivity of fun, fellowship and inter/trans species abolition."--bront" velez "Brimming with irreverence, delight and full-throated urgency on every page...there has never been a more compelling case to radically re-imagine our relationships to more-than-human animals and our environment. My family and I are plotting our BLOODTIDE activations already!"--Sarah Benson Literary Nonfiction. Essay. Hybrid. Poetics. Environmental Studies. LGBTQIA Studies. Art.

214 pages, Paperback

First published November 23, 2021

Reviews

[Caroline · Rating 5 out of 5]

My friend wrote this wacky and wonderful book about celebrating horseshoe crabs, deep time, and unsettling ourselves. A++++ directions for building cardboard horseshoe crab costumes, pageant choreography shared in comics, and rewritten lyrics to Queen for crabaoke.

[Kate · Rating 5 out of 5]

A truly charming, fascinating little volume.

[Sarah Meerkat · Rating 5 out of 5]

utterly delightful and weird and so lovely. gonna make a cardboard horseshoe crab

[Sandy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is basically about how to create a holiday to save a threatened species. It shows how to celebrate the species, rather than lecture about why this species should be saved. So fun. We used many of the practices in Utah to help save Great Salt Lake and in turn save brine shrimp (a crustacean), brine flies and many birds. Groups made cardboard brine shrimp to wear, and cardboard birds to wave, we also had chants, songs, and dance to go along with our rally/celebration. So fun. This book was the inspiration. I hope to meet the author some day. Way to go Eli!

[Amy · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fantastical yet practical manual on how celebrate a new holiday in honor of deep time, horseshoe crabs and ethical relationships with Nature. The celebration can be adapted to other crustaceans.