cover_Bloodlines_09.20.jpg
Author Image-Bianca V.jpeg
cover_Bloodlines_09.20.jpg
Author Image-Bianca V.jpeg

BLOODLINES by Bianca V. Gonzalez Perez

$17.00

BLOODLINES is a reclamation of deeply embedded memory and cultural patterns. The poems work to excavate that-which-is-never-said in a staggering, endearing remake of family narrative and trauma. From nostalgic images of desert and poverty, to yearnings for the continuation of a bloodline, this collection generates a contemporary conversation of what it means to be from the Borderlands. Certain poems shower themselves with bravery, by using addresses, names, and locations, to mentioning real-life Borderland crises. In the titular poem “Bloodlines,” the author writes, “I could not deny . . . This writing of remembrance”. The lines warrant direct attention to the happenings of the speaker’s everyday life as caused by generational wounds. By revisiting place and memory, with poems like “Her Body” and “Broken Inglish,” the poet uses reconstruction as a means to develop a world in which she never lived in, but feels is ultimately her own. Honoring the traditional symbolism of Southwestern literature, BLOODLINES is a dynamic series of cultural imagery and prophecy, continually braiding life cycles with the natural flow of the river and commemorating what the river meant for a generation.

BLOODLINES is a reclamation of deeply embedded memory and cultural patterns. The poems work to excavate that-which-is-never-said in a staggering, endearing remake of family narrative and trauma. From nostalgic images of desert and poverty, to yearnings for the continuation of a bloodline, this collection generates a contemporary conversation of what it means to be from the Borderlands. Certain poems shower themselves with bravery, by using addresses, names, and locations, to mentioning real-life Borderland crises. In the titular poem “Bloodlines,” the author writes, “I could not deny . . . This writing of remembrance”. The lines warrant direct attention to the happenings of the speaker’s everyday life as caused by generational wounds. By revisiting place and memory, with poems like “Her Body” and “Broken Inglish,” the poet uses reconstruction as a means to develop a world in which she never lived in, but feels is ultimately her own. Honoring the traditional symbolism of Southwestern literature, BLOODLINES is a dynamic series of cultural imagery and prophecy, continually braiding life cycles with the natural flow of the river and commemorating what the river meant for a generation.

Born and raised in Del Rio, Texas, Bianca V. Gonzalez Perez received her M.F.A. from Texas State University in 2024. Her debut poetry collection, Pouring Poetry, was published in 2020 by Austin Macauley, LTD. Perez’s work has been featured in Juke Joint Magazine, Defunct Magazine, Harness Magazine, and elsewhere. Perez is currently enrolled at UT Arlington to receive her second Bachelor’s Degree in Nursing. She currently lives in Austin, Texas with her husband Daniel, and the two are expecting their first child together. When not thinking about her next poem, Perez is hiking, reading nutrition books, cooking, or studying.You can find her on Instagram @biancavanessa_poet.

 

“There is a call for remembrance in these poems, a call not to forget how generations survive, how they marry the land, marry their beloveds, and marry memory: “Remember that bloodline / Remember our blood,” Bianca Gonzalez Perez writes, as if writing to her past and future self, as if writing to those who will come after. These poems are the bloodlines of the “[h]eart pulsing / [y]ears pulsing,” an eternal familial pulse yearning to hold itself together. To love. And as Gonzalez Perez reminds us: love “is the relation between dead things, dying things, poisonous things.”  This is where love begins: in the knowing of what to kill and what to let go. Read these poems that want to see everything, which is another way to say that everything in them is a way to love the world.”

—Octavio Quintanilla, author of The Book of Wounded Sparrows (Texas Review Press)

“This radiant debut by Bianca V. Gonzalez Perez captured my heart. By turns blunt and lyrical, elegiac and sensual, the poems in Bloodlines trace the currents of individual passion against the backdrop of family history and the masculine intensity of border culture. “This is Texas, not heaven,” the speaker writes, conjuring the violence and sweetness—the venomous snakes and the sugary figs—that commingle in this book’s bend of the Rio Grande. Here we meet a speaker who is by turns a daughter, sister, lover, and expectant mother—who owns not only her cultural and familial inheritance but also, breathtakingly, her desires. By the end of this book, she has found her true self, an arrival that I can only describe as a luminous homecoming.”

—Cecily Parks, author of The Seeds

“Bloodlines by Bianca V. Gonzalez Perez asks: “Can you feel that?” and the answer is a resounding yes. This collection is viscerally felt, woven with snakes, grief, blood, memory, violence, rivers, family, and place. “This is Texas, not heaven. Nothing / more, nothing less,” Gonzalez Perez writes, as we enter the searing heat of these poems, which radiate with startling imagery and precise form. This book is an excavation and Gonzalez Perez’s poetry opens up questions of what we leave behind and what we return to, with familial ache and unflinching language: “Blood on knucklebones, creek beds, amber sap / all staring back at me.” I keep returning to these poems again and again, blood-full and singing of wounds that can not be forgotten.”

—Jane Wong, author of Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City

“Bloodlines is a beautifully articulate and vulnerable exploration of generational lineage set in a place of borders in the metaphysical and physical sense. In this way, Gonzalez-Perez does not shy away from the interrogation of the self, nor do her lines cower from commentary on societal structures that tear down legacies. Bloodlines is very much a love letter to familial bonds and Texan borderlands. Her readers are lucky to see this love shown on every page, from start to finish.” 

—Bianca Alyssa Pérez, author of GEMINI GOSPEL