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Poetry Canadian

Blood Root

by (author) Jessica Hiemstra

Publisher
Goose Lane Editions
Initial publish date
Mar 2025
Category
Canadian, Women Authors
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9781773104225
    Publish Date
    Mar 2025
    List Price
    $22.00

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Description

Reflecting on a dual upbringing in two villages, Bobcaygeon (Canada/Turtle Island) and Badela (Sierra Leone), Jessica Hiemstra’s new collection of poems delves into her relationship with home. In Blood Root, she interrogates questions of legacy, land, belonging, and the breathtaking intimacy of death.

One moment tender, the next moment dark, hard, and raw, Blood Root blends diary entries, drawings, and lyricism to hold up a polished mirror to colonialism and its echoing impact. Considering beauty and horror in equal reverence “so I’m not human once removed,” Hiemstra cuts through pretence, bearing witness to humans as they confront and connect to one another and the larger world.

About the author

Jessica Hiemstra is an award-winning artist, writer, and designer. Her writing has appeared in chapbooks, essay collections, journals, and in three full-length poetry collections that she also illustrated: The Holy Nothing, Self Portrait without a Bicycle, and Apologetic for Joy. In 2018, Hiemstra won Toronto’s My Entertainment World’s Outstanding Set and Costume Design award for her work on Shannon Bramer’s The Hungriest Woman in the World. In 2021, she received second place in Brush and Lyre’s Palette Poetry prize for her multimedia entry, “Cormorant”, an animation of cormorants in flight over Lake Ontario/ Niigaani-gichigami. Some of these drawings appear in Blood Root.

Jessica Hiemstra's profile page