Bloodmercy

I.S. Jones

APR/Honickman First Book Prize winner

Selected by Nicole Sealey as the winner of the 2025 APR/Honickman First Book Prize, Bloodmercy is a must-read debut that reimagines the tale of Cain and Abel as sisters.

“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.

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ISBN: 9798987585238

Format: Paperback

Daddy’s Girl

Lord forgive me, I am my father’s child:
cunning and arrogant with beauty.
Adam’s first. Daughterprince.
No one beneath God tells me what to do.
Sly and nimble, I’m called “mischief ”
more than my own name and so when I caught
Adam smoking he rewards me with love.
Him with my obedience. My girlness is bound
beneath overalls to Momma’s disappointment.
What she couldn’t corral beneath a dress or brush
back into even barrettes, she sent to Adam.
We exchange glances, laugh with our eyes.
She doesn’t get it and how could she? I am 8
and can only see my mother for her gender—
exhausted to a numb, wounded, bitter
to the touch. The feminine urge to be
my father’s best boi, I boy’d better
the other boys—peed standing up,
won every game of ‘nut check’, shot
my first kill by 10, caught trout by their mouths
at 12, could spit a perfect parabola in the air.
Boylaughed at the other girls for their softness.
Feral against the demure, I am handsome
for the boymouth that refuses mercy. Lot’s wife
is a common story; a tale told from mothers
to daughters about disobedience. Shame measured in salt.
When the first blood came for me—
my girlness was treated like of a fox. Deceitful.
Adam stopped hugging me, yes, but the other boys
rejected me from the tribe. O Father, I have been a girl
all my life. I have no other history. No other master but You.

Reviews

“Reinterpreting Cain and Abel as sisters, the poems in this very impressive debut have the fearsome, violent, musical force of myth. . . . As a series they form a sustained engagement with the idea of power—power we succumb to and power we claim—and triangulate a kind of hybrid space both real and allegorical, in a time both present and eternal-past.”—Elisa Gabbert, New York Times, “Best Poetry of 2025”

“An original and robust new take on Cain and Abel.”—Rebecca Morgan Frank, Lit Hub

“Jones is a poet I look up to for several reasons, a primary one being her attentiveness towards and fearless relationship with language. Between the ancestral and the modern, between angel song and curses, Bloodmercy challenges the reader to question the boundaries of language and what it allows us to do.”—Shlagha Borah, The Rumpus

“I.S. Jones is an important new voice in poetry.”—Charles Rammelkamp, Compulsive Reader