The girls are at Kiera’s because her parents believe in “freedom of expression,” and they can climb trees and catch frogs and lie on the living room floor with the cushions pulled off the couch, watching cartoons and eating sugary cereal from metal mixing bowls for hours. Strange eyes, Ava’s mother always says with the same pinched grimace usually reserved for pulling plugs of their hair from the bathtub drain. Her mouth is a slim, straight line, but her eyes are wide, green-yellow, unblinking. How she holds her hand steady-as if used to slicing herself open-while sunlight falls into the kitchen window and fills her curls with glow. Wise and subversive, spiritual and seductive, Milk Blood Heat showcases that the world in which we live can be a place of obstacles and heartbreak… but also one of grace and splendour.“Pink is the color for girls,” Kiera says, so she and Ava cut their palms and let their blood drip into a shallow bowl filled with milk, watching the color spread slowly on the surface, small red flowers blooming. Moniz contemplates human connection, race, womanhood, inheritance, and the elemental darkness in us all. Through the stories of ordinary characters confronted by extraordinary moments of violent yet often beautiful reckoning, Dantiel W. Set in the suburbs and the cities of the modern world but about the ancient essences of who and what we are, Milk Blood Heat is a collection of love and sex, birth and death. Incredible’Ī thirteen-year-old girl watches her white best friend totter along the edge of a building roof a woman who lost her child in its first trimester finds empathy and horror in the waters of a city aquarium a mother protects her teen daughter from a predatory love interest by taking revenge over a very French supper and two estranged siblings take a road-trip with their dead father’s ashes – rediscovering one another and reckoning with all the ways that trust can be betrayed and love can be redeemed.
‘Sultry, dark, thick with the heat of bodies and minds in sin and transgression. ‘Glorious, ecstatic, devastating… A gorgeous debut from a wickedly talented new author’ ‘A seething excavation of want and human error’ Raven Leilani, author of Luster
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