Bloodroom

"Do you identify with any of the above terminology? Occasionally. Some days they feel appropriate. Others, I resent these tools of our language. I reject and embrace, synchronously."

Bloodroom is 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.