I.S. Jones is a writer I’ve long respected—her poetry, of course, with its immersive and enchanting qualities, but also her editorial eye and interview work in the series Legacy Suite, in which she speaks with early-career poets. Jones’s debut full-length collection, Bloodmercy—selected by Nicole Sealey as the winner of the 2025 APR/Honickman First Book Prize—is captivating. From the very first line, “Violence is a failure of communication,” I was taken in by the possibility of poetry within such a direct statement. What solidified the work as one-of-a-kind was its propensity towards the grotesque, insisting on its relevance to girlhood. 

Bloodmercy reimagines the story of Cain and Abel as sisters, a visceral chronicle of codependency and its consequences. Framed by a striking painting by Shawn Theodore of two Black girls with connected braids who do not look at each other, Jones’s lines never fail to discomfort and to transform. This is aptly captured in the poem “Sister’s Keeper” with the line “I peeled back my skin to unveil a body / Baba would find use in.” This understanding of the self through wound recurs throughout Bloodmercy. Speakers come to the reader in different registers, continually breathing new life into retold events. Jones deepens and complicates a long-known tale into a coming of age, a queer becoming, a processing of abuse, with reverence for the offerings of each player in the Biblical story. 

Shortly after the release of Bloodmercy, I met with Jones over Zoom. She eagerly flipped through Bloodmercy as we spoke, quoting back earlier iterations of lines, building a strong genealogy of the work—each poem becoming as much of a journey off the page as they are already on it. We spoke about the grotesque, how she developed a voice for each of her characters, and the advantages of myth-making. 

Summer Farah: Bloodmercy has now been out for over a week. How are you feeling?

I.S. Jones: I am feeling everything. I did not realize how emotionally demanding writing a book would be, even after? I always thought—erroneously, I realize—that the heaviest part would be finally getting the book out. When I got the paperback, for days I walked around with my book and just looked at it. From one editor to another, you understand: When you look at a book, you’re looking at one version that exists out of a thousand that didn’t. When I was almost done, I thought I had an ending, right? And then the book told me, no, this is not the ending that I want. Us artists, we’ve always had to claw and push to get the things that we need. I think I believed that once the book came out, I would have to do it a little less, and that’s not the case at all! It’s been a lot of relearning how to negotiate for myself. But also, learning to be perfectly fine walking away from the table if I have to. This book won a prize before it ended up winning the Honickman. I had only been sending it out for three months. I always assumed this would be a year and years, years, years long process. For it to happen so suddenly…When I was thinking about the life I wanted this book to have in the world, I thought to myself, I’m gonna do a big scary thing and pull the book from this prize. Summer, I was in shambles about it! Everything could have been different. I’m super fortunate to have had Elizabeth Scanlon as an editor, and to have the APR team behind me, which has been just so, so, so incredible and dreamy.

SF: I have been picking apart the implications of the opening line, “Violence is a failure of communication” so often since I first read it: violence as a result of failure, violence after communication, violence as a reaction. I like that the book begins with after. The first poem is titled “After the Offering Ritual”; it sets the book up to be a response, an aftermath in this failure. You mention the possible versions of this book, but I’m interested—what is this book the aftermath of?

ISJ: I love this question. It was important for me to capture [a reader] with the first line. A lot of poems that I love build tension very early on, either from the title or the first few lines. We, the audience, are made to feel like we’ve been entrusted with this very intimate moment. Because here’s the truth about human nature: Many of us like hot gossip, you feel me? We’ve been led into something that we weren’t supposed to see. It feels more evocative in that way. This book is heavily based on many movies that I love, that colored my interior world, [so] it was important that the opening poem felt cinematic. All the sections should be equally strong, everyone has different ideas about that, but, if you can’t hook them after the first section, most folks don’t have any incentive to read past that. So, the poems are shaped in that way to bring forth that sense of urgency. I grew up in the Celestial Church of Christ, and so I was trying at first to bring in artifacts from the church I grew up in.

SF: There’s a great payoff as a reader from the tension and discomfort in this book. You are so good with leaning into the grotesque. There’s the peeling of skin, the pulsing of the blood—it’s awesome. I love the cheekiness of the poem “A Lot of Blood But Not Much Mercy” that is quite literally about skin picking, and the undoing of the title through this opening of a wound. I’m interested in this impulse and propensity towards the grotesque—what are your influences in building that image? 

ISJ: I wanted to create a story of girlhood that mirrored my own, which was grotesque. I never killed live animals, but my mom taught me how to open up a chicken, to scoop out the innards. Same thing with fish, too. As I matured, I rejected the conventional expectations and totem poles of desire [of girlhood]—what I mean is that, I wasn’t interested in wearing mini skirts or dresses, or having purses. I hated purses. I wanted to learn how to build cars, and I wanted to have my hands in the dirt. My mom and I would garden together a lot, too. Rot is a large part of this book. I love rot in that it is a symbol of the inevitable aging of time, like, maggots come for us all, rot comes for us all. 

There was a story, or a poem, that we read about a lynching my first year at The Watering Hole. This hideous, horrible thing to have lynched this body, but when the poem opened, it’s talking about the light, the early autumn light, and the crisp leaves underfoot, and the morning dew shining off of this recently deceased body. I thought about how marvelous, and how strange, and how delightful it is to find beauty in these places that one would assume would be devoid of beauty. I wanted to bring that to the book. There’s a delight I have in making language around the things that often bring us discomfort. Discomfort is not something that’s 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. If I am the grotesque beast everyone believes I am, no one will try to hurt me. That way, grotesqueness is almost kind of like a shield. 

SF: The joining of things is a major aspect of this book. It’s present in the cover and the title; the poem “Bloodmercy” has the melding of Cain and Abel into Cannibal, into Claimable, this sort of taking of, an adjoining and an ownership. I’m interested in how this phrase, “bloodmercy,” holds the book.

ISJ: It feels woo-woo and prophetic, but it’s true that the book told me, this is my name. The name itself has kind of changed meanings. If we were to break down the word “mercy” by itself, it literally means divine gift, right? There’s an implication, etymologically, that mercy is something that only God could give. Blood, obviously, has multiple meanings to it, too, right? It means kinship; it can also mean history. When I think about the biblical implication of [blood], after Cain kills his brother, God says, your brother’s blood wails to me from the ground. Blood also means connection, and it means bond, but it is also a language on its own. What does it mean to always be bound to another person? Even families who maybe break contact still carry pieces of each other with them. No matter how much you might be in disharmony with your family, you are still of them, you know? Bloodmercy. In the book, it’s very clear that the sisters have a borderline codependent relationship. When I was thinking about how to differentiate the voices of Cain, Eve, and Abel, I was thinking about the three modes of poetry. Lyrical. Abel is narrative. Eve is dramatic. If we’re writing this same poem from Cain’s perspective, she’s gonna be rapping a little bit. If we’re writing this poem from Abel’s perspective, she has a lot to say, especially because, canonically, Abel does not have a voice in the original fable. I wanted a single word that evoked the suffocating nature of family. My enduring questions to God.

SF: Could you talk a little bit more about how you developed each speaker? 

ISJ: Eve represents my adult womanhood. In the first two sections of the book where Cain and Abel are young girls, Eve interjects often in their sections. I [did that] because I wanted Eve evenly put throughout the book, so that way when we get to the end and we have her section, it doesn’t feel like it’s out of nowhere. There was [also] some connective tissue that was missing that I couldn’t yet see between Cain and Abel. I realized Eve is the crux of all the conflict between the sisters. I realized that that parallels my own life. None of the conflict, at least in Bloodmercy, happens without Eve, right? She’s the reason they’re banned from the Garden of Eden. She is the reason that the sisters repeatedly fight and triangulate, by her unintentional favoritism. By using Eve as the connective tissue, it helped me incorporate her, but also make those clear sections and make the voices different between Cain and Abel. 

[With Cain], I wanted to have my childhood self move through this strange new world and make language around it. What is it like to watch the world quite literally form around you? Abel was really the hardest of the voices, because Abel’s only personality, canonically, is that he was martyred by his brother. We don’t know if he was an obnoxious little brother, even though I suspect that he was. Abel’s name quite literally means vapor. It means nothing. It means air. I thought about that immense loneliness. To be remembered as the sibling that got slaughtered. I wanted to take some of that second-born resentment and some of my own language around having been queer very young, but not yet having language for it. All the places where I wanted to negotiate my relationship to beauty, and to ugliness, and to labor, and to usefulness, all of that poured itself into Abel. I realized, oh my god, Abel’s gay! Oh my god, this little girl is gay, wow! It birthed some of my favorite poems in the book, too. What if Abel got to live long enough to see her childhood mistakes? What if Cain and Abel got to live long enough to be adults? I think, for me, that is more terrifying than the original version. 

SF: The way you talk about building language as you come into awareness of the world reminds me of the poem “Juice or Milk”.

ISJ: “Juice or Milk” is the oldest story about myself that my mom tells me. A lot of this book, especially Section 1, is governed by my child logic. We would only pray in Yoruba, and so I thought, okay, obviously, we pray in Yoruba because that’s what the angels understand, and the angels send the prayers up to God. I wanted to, in a nostalgic way, capture the first few words I learned in Yoruba. It. Sometimes when people see non-English in a poem, they freak out. For a long time, I almost cut this poem because of that fear, but [I wanted] this book to have an almost home-movies vibe to it, like the intimate videos of someone’s childhood on a very old, grainy VHS. [“Juice or Milk”] is one of those core memories that are on the VHS in the back of my head. My parents would not teach me Yoruba as a child. In part, they were terrified of me having a thick African accent. My parents mostly spoke Yoruba [at home], so that’s what I spoke back to them. When I went to school, as my mom tells the story, during lunchtime, the teachers went around and asked all the kids, “Do you want juice or milk?” And then I said back, “Juice or milk?” Because I didn’t understand what they meant. They called my mom and said, “Hey, I don’t know what language you’re speaking to your child at home, but it’s really important that she learns English.” And so my parents stopped speaking to me in Yoruba after that. I think with most immigrant parents, because they want their child to have the best of everything, they seem to conflate the “best of everything” with being “as American as possible.” Those are not the same thing at all. But then also, my parents are more patriotic than me, and I get it. I didn’t have to labor for my citizenship; they did. Their relationship to America will always be different than mine.

SF: Could you talk about the role myth-making plays in processing these archetypical pressures of the eldest daughter, of womanhood, of specific visions for gender and sexuality, and on?

ISJ: If I imagine myself as Cain, which, technically, I am, I would want to ask my mother, “What was your life like before me?” She can’t say. I always imagined the land of Nod like Nigeria. Sometimes, this self-myth-making is a way of rewriting a history that both made me but had to come at a cost. I think about how there’s this whole part of my mother’s life that she will never tell me about. And poems, in some ways, are a way to make new space in that sort of darkness. Myth seems to allow us permission to try to give ourselves a better story. I think often about my mother in this book and about how she says things that my own mother would never say. But I remember when I had read an earlier version of some of these poems to her, she was really startled by how intensely I listened. When I think about myth-making, I also think about Zora Neale Hurston, as many women of my generation probably do, specifically about how much of her life was about archival work and record keeping. There are things that we have to pay attention to and keep track of. In the Bible, women were not trusted with record keeping. Women were not trusted with very integral parts of history. Even Peter’s hatin’ ass—in the non-canonical books of the Bible, Mary Magdalene was considered one of the apostles. Peter, who was a jealous hater, said to God, “God, you can’t let her be an apostle, you can’t trust her, she’s a woman.” Not like, oh, she did this and she’s a woman. Just, she can’t be trusted. I think about how powerful myth-making can be in that way, right? Not that we can bypass history, but myth-making gives us a new playing field with which to negotiate history upon.