Dantiel W. Moniz

A livewire debut from Dantiel W. Moniz, one of the most exciting discoveries in today's literary landscape, Milk Blood Heat depicts the sultry lives of Floridians in intergenerational tales that contemplate human connection, race, womanhood, inheritance, and the elemental darkness in us all. Set among the cities and suburbs of Florida, each story delves into the ordinary worlds of young girls, women, and men who find themselves confronted by extraordinary moments of violent personal reckoning. These intimate portraits of people and relationships scour and soothe and blast a light on the nature of family, faith, forgiveness, consumption, and what we may, or may not, owe one another. A thirteen-year-old meditates on her sadness and the difference between herself and her white best friend when an unexpected tragedy occurs; a woman recovering from a miscarriage finds herself unable to let go of her daughter--whose body parts she sees throughout her daily life; a teenager resists her family's church and is accused of courting the devil; servers at a supper club cater to the insatiable cravings of their wealthy clientele; and two estranged siblings take a road-trip with their father's ashes and are forced to face the troubling reality of how he continues to shape them. Wise and subversive, spiritual and seductive, Milk Blood Heat forms an ouroboros of stories that bewitch with their truth, announcing the arrival of a bright new literary star.

Milk Blood Heat

Alli

Trying to name it was like pulling up words from her belly, bucketful after bucketful, all that effort but they never meant what she wanted them to.

I have never read such an accurate description of what it’s like to be a 13 y/o girl

She is newly thirteen, hollowed out and filled back up with venom and dust-cloud dreams.

I considered that this was all being human amounted to, layer upon layer of looking.

it was her understanding that people tried to imagine as little as possible about other people's lives unless it suited them.

But Billie wasn't fooled; she knew that, worldwide, money was the cult over all things, no goodness or sin excluded. She was witnessing, in her news feeds and with her own eyes, how much a life was worth.

I hoped I would be like that someday: my hair over my shoulder, posture immaculate, fixing sandwiches in my own home in a man's Hawaiian shirt.

"You learn to be who you are, or you die as someone else. It's simple."

Milk Blood Heat quotes

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