Sundress Publications announces the upcoming release of Kay E. Bancroft’s Bloodroom, a howling, scorching debut collection of deftly formatted poetry—circling, and delicately probing, themes of familial debt, legacy, obligation, and the matriline. Through an index of past wounds and inherited scars, the speaker bleeds their histories together with the slow erosion of nostalgia.
These poems offer an incisive and scalding interrogation of gender, yet are often unbearably tender—a swirling emulsion of grief and anger poured into an intricately technical and beautifully challenging mold. Each piece draws out a tragic, cyclical song of love and loss, resentment and admiration, as though drawing poison from a wound. Bancroft’s writing is meditative, cleansing, and compulsively readable: recounting a feminine childhood transformed into something monstrous until seen through a new lens. Bloodroom is a plea to identity, to the process of searching for purpose and of seeking certainty in a broken world.
Paige Lewis, author of Space Struck, writes that “Kay E. Bancroft makes me want to be brave—to be able to watch horror movies with my eyes open and to shake up language until only sincerity remains. Get ready to experience Bloodroom, a work that is part poetry collection, part museum exhibit, and part science experiment. You will walk away from this book a whole new creature.”
You can purchase your copy on the Sundress website.
Kay E. Bancroft is a queer nonbinary writer, editor, educator, and artist based in Cincinnati, OH. They hold an MFA in Poetry from Randolph College, and a BA from the University of Cincinnati. Their writing has been a finalist for the Alice James Book Award, the RHINO Founders’ Poetry Prize, and more. You can find them on most social platforms @keb.poet and on their website at kayebancroftpoet.com
