Lauded by Lit Hub as one of the best poetry books of 2025, I. S. Jones sits down with Taylor Johnson to discuss her collection, BLOODMERCY.About this Event
About the book:
"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.
About the author:
I.S. Jones is the author of Bloodmercy, chosen by Nicole Sealey as the winner of the 2025 APR / Honickman First Book Prize and the chapbook Spells of My Name, selected by Newfound in 2021 for their Emerging Writers Series. Currently, she 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 works have appeared in Granta, LA Review of Books, Guernica, Prairie Schooner, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. While she has lived in many places across the U.S., she gratefully calls Chicago home.
The event will be moderated by Taylor Johnson.
Taylor Johnson is from Washington, DC. He is the author of (Alice James Books, 2020), winner of the 2021 Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America and a 2024 Whiting Award. His work appears in Poetry Magazine, The Paris Review, The Baffler, Scalawag, and elsewhere. Johnson is a Cave Canem graduate fellow and a recipient of the 2017 Larry Neal Writers’ Award from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, and the 2021 Judith A. Markowitz Award for Emerging Writers from Lambda Literary. Taylor was the inaugural 2022 Poet-in-Residence at the Guggenheim Museum. He is the Poet Laureate of Takoma Park, Maryland. With his wife, Elizabeth Bryant, Taylor curates the Green Way Reading Series at People’s Book in Takoma Park.
Accessibility note: This event is up two flights of stairs and Lost City Books does not have an elevator. Please contact [email protected] with questions.
Dato de accesibilidad: Este evento toma lugar en el segundo piso y Lost City Books no tiene ascensor. Favor de contactar [email protected] con cualquiera duda.
Event Venue
Lost City Books, 2467 18th Street Northwest, Washington, United States
USD 0.00
