Blood Root - by Jessica Hiemstra (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

A seething little masterpiece. In three long poems flooded with rage and remorse, Hiemstra reckons with a life that spans three continents and a childhood haunted by beautiful woods and killing hands, "a universe housed in every dead body." Blood Root is a confession, an interrogation, and ultimately an elegy for all the broken birds and drowned kittens of Hiemstra's earliest years. I love how raw and honest and spare these poems are, how at the heart of this astonishingly forgiving book is a relentless, unshakable compassion for all living things.

Compassionate and lyrical, Hiemstra's poems envision a world where "prayer's the bright darting / of a red-winged blackbird." They issue us all a caution: learn from past mistakes because "what we don't return to the earth / our children inherit." Grounded in natural and animal imagery, Blood Root grapples with Hiemstra's familial colonial history. Through acknowledging the violence enacted by her Dutch Christian ancestors and her missionary childhood, Hiemstra attempts to reconcile this past with the interconnectedness of peoples and the natural world.

Hiemstra's writing is raw and unflinching as she wrestles with the echoes of colonialism and humanity's bruising impact on the natural world . . .

Jessica Hiemstra offers up "a confession which makes you holy," taking things apart -- her Dutch Reformed upbringing v. the fact of having a body "drunk with wonder" -- a reckoning, balancing gentleness with mercy, seeking to claim that rarest of things, communion with the living and the dead. Nothing compares or even comes close to articulating the hallowed human stain that remains. A breathtaking achievement.

The poems in Blood Root are always lyrical, and they are always raw. Hiemstra is drawn to hard edges. Just when you think you can breathe, she pushes you over the precipice.

The work of this poem is not only to untangle [these stolen stories] but to unsettle the expectations of comfort in the pursuit of justice.

Through the intertwining of memory and loss, Blood Root compels readers to confront the complex truths of our own sense of belonging, leaving us not with answers, but with the vital reminder that we are all irrevocably shaped by the past we carry within us.

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.