Bloodroom: An Evening with Kay E. Bancroft

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.

6 pm reception/6:30 pm program
Free & open to the public. Registration required.

Copies of Bloodroom will be available for sale & signing courtesy of Downbound Books.

About Kay E. Bancroft

Kay E. Bancroft is a writer, educator, and artist from Cincinnati, OH. They hold an MFA in Creative Writing-Poetry from Randolph College, and a BA in Rhetoric and Professional Writing from the University of Cincinnati. Their writing has appeared in Poet Lore, Pleiades Journal, RHINO Poetry, Passengers Journal, The Rumpus, & more. Explore more of their work at kayebancroftpoet.com