Blood Bible - by Damaris Hill (Hardcover)

About the Book

In her most ambitious work yet, NAACP Image Award-nominated author DaMaris B. Hill considers Black identity and the inescapable weight of American history.

Book Synopsis

In her most ambitious work yet, NAACP Image Award-nominated author DaMaris B. Hill considers Black identity and the inescapable weight of American history.

America's monuments and anthems are pervasive hornets swarming about my ears . . .

When DaMaris B. Hill thinks of home, she thinks of America, its monuments, its anthems, and the weight of its history. Just as her ancestry is bound up with the trans-Atlantic slave trade, so is her personal identity inextricably tied to these United States. This is a kind of double-consciousness, a cleaved sense of allegiance, a hornet's nest at every haven.

Blood Bible inhabits the swarm. Interweaving memory with national mythology, family stories with national history, Hill traces the Bermudan slave trade system to her mother's immigration, her country's religious history to her pastor father's congregation, her own military service during the 9/11 attacks to the financial crisis servicepeople faced returning home.

In the process, Hill learns how her own story and her country's are inextricably linked. The result is an account, sometimes scathing and desperate, musical, and always unflinching. Blood Bible is a reckoning with ancestry, home, and national identity from one of the country's finest poets.

Review Quotes

"Urgent . . . luminous . . . readers are lucky to be with her in these outstanding pages." --Publishers Weekly, starred review, on BREATH BETTER SPENT

"DaMaris B. Hill is a brilliant poet historian who has created an important lyrical excavation that's never been more necessary." --Ada Limón, National Book Award Finalist, on A BOUND WOMAN IS A DANGEROUS THING

"[A] bitter, unflinching history that artfully captures the personas of these captivating, bound yet unbridled African-American women." --The Rumpus, "Reads to Celebrate Black History," on A BOUND WOMAN IS A DANGEROUS THING

"[A] haunting, powerful collection . . . This book bears witness. This book is a reckoning." --Roxane Gay, on A BOUND WOMAN IS A DANGEROUS THING

About the Author

DaMaris B. Hill, PhD, is the author of Breath Better Spent: Living Black Girlhood; A Bound Woman Is a Dangerous Thing, an NAACP Image Award Finalist; The Fluid Boundaries of Suffrage and Jim Crow: Staking Claims in the American Heartland; and a collection of poetry, Vi-ze-bel Teks-chers(Visible Textures). An Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Kentucky and a former service member of the United States Air Force, she was a Visiting Faculty Fellow with the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America at Brown University and a Research Fellow at Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. She is currently NEH Fellow at John Carter Brown Library. She lives in Kentucky. www.damarishill.com