About This Title
Blood on the Leaves by Hope Wabuke is a searing and lyrical poetry collection that explores the intimate, haunted relationship between Blackness and the natural world. At once a site of refuge and rupture, nature emerges as both witness to generational trauma and a space of beauty, survival, and fierce possibility.
Hewn from historical record and personal experience, these poems unearth the brutal legacy of slavery and the enduring persistence of systemic racism, tracing how violence echoes through land, body, and bloodline. Wabuke weaves history, science, and the environment into the personal—examining gender, motherhood, identity, and the Black body as sites of resistance and remembrance.
Blood on the Leaves stands as a powerful testament to the Black experience, survival, memory, and the enduring power of love.
Praise for Blood on the Leaves
"The title of Hope Wabuke’s most recent book, Blood on the Leaves, hearkens back to what may be considered Billie Holiday’s most political song. And like Holiday, Wabuke’s voice here is relentless in its subtleties and distinctive in its vulnerabilities: 'What is normal is this: I want to love you,/dearest, like love is still a normal//breathing thing to believe in…' This is a one of a kind collection of poetry, a chronicle of survival.” —Jericho Brown, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and author of The Tradition
“In her second collection, Wabuke is unflinching, asking us as readers to join her in not looking away from the difficult and timely subjects the poems trace, including domestic violence, misogyny, racism, migration, and environmental collapse. The elegiac mode holds sway in this moving collection, in which personal and public histories converge in searing lyric-narrative poems. ‘In the silence/the wind through the trees is the shaking of ghosts’ the poet declares, in one of the title poems and crown of sonnets that highlights Wabuke’s formal power. But perhaps more than any other measure, Wabuke’s truth-telling voice is the singular force throughout this collection, speaking into the ‘silence’ that threatens to undo us and confronting the ‘ghosts’ of history, memory, the land, and the body.” —Shara McCallum, author of Behold
Publication date: November, 3 2026
Ebook ISBN: 9781968507190
Hardcover ISBN: 9781968507206
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