Dantiel W. Moniz's debut collection, Milk Blood Heat, is a hypnotizing revelation. In these 11 stories, love, grief, rebellion and hunger swirl about girls and women (re)possessing their bodies and spirits. Set amid Florida's retention ponds, under a sun like "a wax lemon melting, oozing light," characters on the brink of change consider the fugitive qualities of darkness and light, how they play both against and with one another, alternately freeing and restricting.
The titular "Milk Blood Heat" is as playful, melancholy and heartbreaking as its two 13-year-old girls from vastly different worlds who become blood sisters. Ava, "newly thirteen, hollowed out and filled back up with venom and dust-cloud dreams," plays at being a monster, "unnatural and unfamiliar in her body." She's among a few teenagers in this collection, and Moniz blesses them all with tender and brutal complexity, adeptly avoiding the usual gratuitous stigmas about teenage girls.
In "Tongues," 17-year-old Zey bucks against the decree from church and family that "she can be looked on, but not look." In "An Almanac of Bones," Sylvie is being raised by her unconventional grandmother while her mother travels the world. As they prepare for an upcoming "moon festival," Sylvie--always "interested in discarded things"--finds solace in the structure of animal bones and the mysteries of the deep earth where she's "a glorious creature, spare and glowing."
Moniz's debut is a beautifully unsettling gospel of light and dark, declaring "you could be both things and still be loved." --Shannon Hanks-Mackey, editor and writer