Bloodmercy
I.S. Jones
Copper Canyon Press, 2025, 88 pages
$16.00

Reviewed by Beth Brown Preston

This debut collection of poetry, Bloodmercy by American/Nigerian poet Itiola S. Jones, is a reimagining and retelling of the biblical story of Cain and Abel. In the original narrative from the Bible, Adam and Eve, the first humans, are living the life of paradise in the Garden of Eden. They are forbidden to eat the fruit from the tree of knowledge, but a serpent tempts Eve, and Adam and Eve are cast out from the Garden. God inflicts punishment upon them. For Eve, her punishment means that she will suffer the pains of childbirth and live her days in dutiful obedience to her husband. Together, Adam and Eve bear many children, including Cain and Abel. In the Bible, Cain kills Abel in a fit of jealousy when God prefers Abel’s sacrificial offering to his, thus becoming the first murderer.

“Violence is a failure of communication” (5) is the opening line of this collection. Cain and Abel are reimagined as sisters whose love for each other becomes fraught with envy as they both compete for the attention of their negligent father. In this version of the story, Cain does not kill Abel. Instead, the girls’ bodies blossom as they experience the shame of their mother Eve’s sin in the Garden. The girls come into their own budding sexuality. Bloodmercy follows the sisters, Cain and Abel, as they grow from girlhood into womanhood—becoming women who ultimately discover the limits of power and control, violence and sexuality, faith, death, and mankind’s failed attempts to hold dominion over the world. In another poem, “We Are Soft Between Hours,” a declaration of Cain’s love for her sister, she says: “What pleasure possesses you, / sister, I want for myself. In this night, everything is about the moon— / even her absence, even you. Eventually, someone wants something, / that’s the nature of power” (21).

Bloodmercy was selected by Nicole Sealey as the winner of the 2025 American Poetry Review’s Honickman Prize. Jones is the first woman of color to receive this prestigious award. Nicole Sealey remarks in her introduction to this collection: “. . . Bloodmercy asks, from its opening to closing poems: What does mercy look like? Rather than fully formed renderings, Jones offers composite sketches—images mined from the poet’s sharp and singular vision. With verse from the perspective of Eve, and a thread of poems reimagining Cain and Abel as sisters, Bloodmercy wrestles with the idea of grace, vis-à-vis myth and memory, gender and sexuality, with the utmost urgency” (1).

These poems are located in an evolving remote natural landscape, a mythic realm set in a time between the Old Testament and the modern era. The two girls begin to mature, to gaze toward heaven, and pose questions to God. Within “After the Offering Ritual, Cain Carries Abel Home,” a kind of prelude in Cain’s voice, Jones describes the moment of the sacrificial offering to God. In the Bible, it was the offering ritual that provoked Cain’s jealousy and the murder of his brother. In Jones’s poem, Cain does not slay her sister. Rather, she shows Abel tenderness and mercy after the killing of the sacrificial goat.

We have blood and dirt,
together they make God. And what does mercy look like
between humans? A sister reaching to lift a sister
from the ground. When I say a love that will end us,
I mean ‘mercy.’ Remember, I offered you my hand once.
Push me away if you like (5).

All the voices in these poems are spoken by Cain, Abel, and Eve. However, Bloodmercy focuses, in large part, on the voices of the sisters as they grow into womanhood. “Daddy’s Girl,” again spoken by Cain, begins with an invocation to God. “Lord, forgive me. I am my father’s child: / cunning and arrogant with beauty. / Adam’s first. Daughter prince. / No one beneath God tells me what to do” (15). She continues in this poem with a celebration of her childhood:

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 . . . (15).

Jones’s verses discomfort and attempt to startle her readers, as in her poem “Sister’s Keeper”: “I peeled back my skin to unveil a body / Baba would find use in” (10). An understanding of the self through wound is a recurrent theme; these poems lean toward the grotesque. The poet, talking about her sense of imagination, has said: “There’s a delight I have in making language around the things that often bring us discomfort. Discomfort is not something that is a deterrent for me. If anything, the things that make me the most uncomfortable is where the art-making for me begins. I also think about how the grotesque, at least in the context of this book, is a measure of survival” (Summer Farah, Electric Lit interview).

There is so much to explore in this powerful collection—Bloodmercy. The word “mercy” means “divine gift,” implying that mercy is something only God can give. Blood means kinship, connection, a bond. Jones’s childhood self moves through these poems into womanhood in the persona of Cain. Her self-mythmaking is her way of rewriting her own history. Jones has also revealed that when she wrote this book, she imagined herself as Cain—mirroring the time of her own coming of age and emergence into womanhood. To the poet, “blood” represents a bond, familial connections, and trust, despite the dysfunction of her childhood. By examining the concepts of blood and mercy, these poems explore the meaning of violence, desire, queerness, faith, power, and control, alongside the human need for mercy and forgiveness.

Beth Brown Preston is a poet and novelist. A graduate of Bryn Mawr College and the MFA Writing Program of Goddard College, she has been a CBS Fellow in Writing at the University of Pennsylvania and a Bread Loaf Scholar in Nonfiction. Her new poetry collection is OXYGEN II (Aquarius Press/Willow Books, 2025).