Jenuine’s voice is a skillful soul dance between the internal and external, transcendent and imminent, spirit and matter, dream and reality. Blood as a constant motif invites deep flowing as well as constant pouring of life liquid, which also traverses these lines, these images, these words. Thank you Jenuine for that moon glow, rain mist, woman flower. Reading BloodStories, I felt like a thirsty hummingbird gorging on precious nectar.
—Luis J. Rodriguez, Los Angeles Poet Laureate, author of Borrowed Bones and My Nature is Hunger
As I read BloodStories I let each drop of lost blood saturate my eyes, hands, and history. Jenuine Poetess is not only exercising her history, but the history of every person who has ever suffered in silence, illuminating the path for every person who has succumbed to the griefscream of disbelief, heartbreak, and disappointment. The weight of her words are for everyone, a must read for all, as each poem elucidates the long and bloody tradition of forced subordination of femme bodies under patriarchy.
–Caseyrenée Lopez, Founder/Editor-in-Chief of Crab Fat Magazine
Throughout Jenuine Poetess’ verses ‘…you will find / all our stories spilling out / the deep red blood of / our throbbing / our thriving’. This poet sings with a timeless, soulful lyricism rare among modern poets who play safe and lean toward prosaic language. In BloodStories we experience the shock and warm familiarity of blood as a signal of hurt, its shedding an inevitable part of the cycles of nature – all the while remaining the essence of life, and poetry, itself.
– Allan Aquino, poet and professor of Asian American Studies, California State University, Northridge
Reading BloodStories is like gazing deep into a glass abyss, waiting for the day when life goes back to normal, until you discover normal is living with the broken panes. Identity lies in the catastrophic trials, where growth through isolation reveals an elegant new strength. Jenuine Poetess reveals a glimpse of the trek within many of us, along with the very descriptive cycles of survival.
–Libbie Toler, writer
