Hemorrhaging Want & Water
Hemorrhaging Want & Water (Perennial Press 2023)
Pastoral city smut for bad girls with big hearts. This body of poems travels between multiple cities, leaving stains and collecting names.
Once you’ve been in one city you’ve been in every city. In this collection, space is foregrounded and becomes a main character— alive, doubling, and challenging limits. Poems unspool themes of heritage, identity, erotic labor, violence, and possibility.
The elusive brilliance of Hemorrhaging Want & Water is its power. Its validating comfort. That breaking when you fall is just another day. Another unbroken opportunity to do the same; to remain the same but still unearth desires in every city where we find a photo-worthy road to make the body buoyant, to name ourselves anew in a world that wants to pass us by.
—Shauna Barbosa, author of Cape Verdean Blues
Hemorrhaging Want & Water is a city in the golden hours, illuminating the rise and fall of the sun as well as the crucial time needed to survive the “choreography of street corners.” Here, Alias dances, her body shaped by this labor. The system of “sharp syllables … testing the limits of body.” This body of wings and holograms and sky. This body as ghost and shadow. This body inside the water cities, where “a map starts to grow inside” pomegranate hearts and the language of prayer spoken with five mouths. Artillery is Alias’s lineage... This book is alive and its edges are cellular memories of rain. Triumphant.
—Michelle Naka Pierce, author of Continuous Frieze Bordering Red
Hemorrhaging Want & Water is a restless book, "a moving body that eventually comes into contact." Mapping questions of heritage, sex work, and consent across a constellation of cities, Emily Marie Passos Duffy writes a poetry of eros and errancy for the 21st century. As the poet invites us to "'dream with' instead of 'dream of,’" she expands the spaces between language and desire through geographies made real because they are vigorously imagined.
— Lucas de Lima, author of Tropical Sacrifice
Hemorrhaging Want & Water is a field guide on self awareness and external exploration as survival instinct and pleasure practice... you need to read this book even though you might not know it yet or simply might not know how to ask for what you need.
—ellie swensson, author of Salt of Us