The Blood Poems

by Jessica Helen Lopez

The Blood Poems is one part bloodletting, one part healing, and one part sensuous celebration as Jessica Helen Lopez lays out what it means to be a strong brown woman, a single mother, and the kickass bard that the twenty-first century needs. Lopez openly faces a damaging childhood, sex, divorce, and racial injustice in these poems. She proves that love is as complicated as lovemaking--messy and lusty, raucous and powerful, capable of amazing highs and abysmal lows. She proves that when a woman learns to love herself, she will live a fierce and full life and teach her daughters to do the same.

Genres: Poetry

112 pages, Paperback

First published July 15, 2021

Reviews

[Terry Mulcahy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Blood oranges, boiling blood, black-blue blood, kicking it with death, from anger to no anger, in-between-the-legs freedom, fickle fire. "Blue and lonely as a salty song calling for a shore."
This woman writes about life, her life, and life as poetry. She haunts the house of blood.
She includes an eight-page poem for a new love, followed by a poem titled: THE LAST POEM I WILL WRITE FOR MY LOVER, a sad lament following the goodbye they shared.
I enjoy her poems, her wordplay, and the passion she puts into her writing. I'm a fan. I try to attend most of the events she participates in because I enjoy her poetry in person so much. She is a passionate intelligence that reaches out to connect with people through poetry, and I always come away energized.

[Myla Dengler · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really beautiful and dark and powerful and just a pleasure to read!