67 books like Blood Dazzler

The poems in this book made me feel glad to be alive in a world that feels like it’s ending. I loved how Jones situated personal grief within disasters of national and international scale; grieving a mother is as monumental as grieving a world. 

I also found it compelling how Jones consistently maintains a musical quality to the poems’ language. The first two lines of, 'Saeed, How Dare You Make Your Mother into a Prelude', are: "And then, night neons itself inside me / and I begin missing you in loud new ways.”

Multisensory with pleasing consonance, these lines are a small sample of Jones’s linguistic verve. Full of wit and sincerity, these poems made me want to write my own defiant love letter to the apocalypse. 

If there are two things I love, it’s persona poems and a sustained concept throughout a collection. Like Blood Dazzler by Patricia Smith above, this book has both things.

A book of persona poems imagining the 2011 tsunami that devastated Japan as a series of monsters battling against the 50 employees who remained on-site after the tsunami, the collection weaves seamlessly between languages and comic book-like sound effects that create a heroic narrative in a sparse style.

This collection is one I return to when I think of trying to combat apocalyptic despair; if 50 people can face down a fatal situation, then I can live through another, less catastrophic day. 

What I love most about this collection is how it begins with an ending: printed on the inside jacket flap of the book is the end poem, 'The End of Poetry,' which demands an end to the intangibles of poetic clichés and calls instead for physical sensation.

The intense desire to be touched is heightened with the COVID-19 pandemic hanging over each poem; the pandemic is never named, but I felt the ache of social distancing. The pandemic is another kind of catastrophe, one that is tenderly and vividly captured in this book.

What I love most about this book is the strident, confident way the poems tackle our expectations about prose and poetic genres. Right from the collection's first poem, the book says that language is only the beginning; it still has its limits, though it can achieve longevity in the right conditions. 

However, my favorite poem of the collection is 'Shakespeare Doesn't Care,' a poem where Dove imagines Shakespeare’s confident, coy response to comments on his prolific, inimitable career. In doing so, she highlights how his work points the finger of judgment through time. Dove does this, too.

This is not a book of portents, nor is it strictly a celebration or mourning of an apocalyptic world; instead, it highlights the strange echoes of history.

In the wake of super-hurricanes and the deadly pandemic that follows, New Orleans has been quarantined from the rest of the United States, and those who seek to cross the border wall are killed. Narrator Fen, a member of the clan-based culture that has developed behind the wall, tells the story of her people and her personal quest for freedom in a dialect voice that is both beautifully rendered and brutally honest.

Humans can be brave, and humans can be stubborn. Abdulrahman Zeitoun is both.

Refusing to leave New Orleans as Hurricane Katrina built strength out at sea in 2005, he stays and finds himself stranded in an eerily flooded city, seemingly alone and without help. He paddles the watery “streets” in an old kayak and finds others who could not or did not leave, offering help, and for his efforts, is arrested as a suspected terrorist and looter.

This book is not a simple tale of an everyday hero. We meet a character that downplays the dangers of a brewing storm but, despite his stubbornness, is also capable of great selflessness and bravery. The negligence of the institutions we expect to protect us is an insidious theme that runs throughout.

With the unusual title, this book was recommended to me by a bubbly store book clerk. Afraid to tell her no, thank you. I paid for the book and fled the store. I was hooked from the first line of the book to the last. As LJ takes the stage full of suspicion, Andra is on edge yet stoic. They seem an unlikely pairing. The unfolding of the story is like a long-awaited date night. Hopeful, warm, with the promise of more. This story is a reminder that odds can be overcome if you are strong enough to stand alone when others want you to sit down. 

Claire DeWitt is a troubled detective hired to solve a disappearance in post-Katrina New Orleans.

She learned her craft by studying the teachings of an elusive French detective, and was set on her career path after failing to find her missing friend as a teenager. She is haunted by disappearances of all kinds, and through this fascinating main character Gran weaves an atmospheric, compelling mystery.

The first time I read this book a hidden door in my writing brain unlocked—detective novels can be more than the classic setup of a talented sleuth following the clues. They can be messy and enigmatic and unsettling—in fact, Gran convinced me that they should be.

The Tin Roof Blowdown shows us New Orleans, and the surrounding areas the days after Katrina raged havoc. Taking into account the lives that have been traumatized as crime and murders increased nine-fold. Detective David Robicheaux of Iberia Parish finds himself in the midst of a murder in an old-time neighborhood, as he tries to figure out if the murder of a local black boy during a robbery was racially motivated or not. The details and stories of this horrific tragedy show the bleakness of the aftermath and that not only did many reach their deaths, but how many who survived died also. No order exists as Robicheaux tries to unravel his latest mystery.

As someone who lived in New Orleans before, during, and after Hurricane Katrina, I often wondered why different communities bounced back from that terrible flooding. Mark van Landingham finds that, despite low levels of English fluency, education, and income, the Vietnamese and Vietnamese-American community of Village De L’Est brought back more people and businesses than any other part of the city. Within a year they were back to 90% capacity of pre-Katrina levels. This community's residents – connected to each other through Catholicism and a shared language and history – worked collectively to help evacuees who had scattered across the country. Through collective action, they rebuilt their community even better, adding in new schools, medical centers, and even urban farms.