Blueberries Stain Like Blood, by E.B. Schnepp

Poetry, chapbook, 32 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

Blueberries Stain Like Blood is a series of artifacts, of folktales and old wives whispers, of bare-faced longings among the all too common violences that the same sensationalize, making a cautionary tale of the mundane. History intertwines with fable and the collection’s own echoing anxieties to present a tangle of body horror, omnipresent hunger, and survival.

Underpinning all of this, though, is a familiar rurality. A homescape that can be reached for, but that the speaker can never fully grasp or be embraced by. Borrowing nostalgia and collaging memories, real and false, the speaker reaches through decades toward what they imagine such a place could look like. Dirt roads, deep wood and swampland, bright berries, the kind of wild space whose appetites mirror the speaker’s own. A place to get lost; a place to be found.

E.B. Schnepp is a poet currently residing in Chicago. Their work has been featured in Poetry Daily and can be found in Gulf Coast, Nat. Brute, and Iron Horse Review, among others.