Blood Root by Jessica Hiemstra

Blood Root, the title of Jessica Hiemstra’s powerful new poetry collection, evokes the bloodroot flower, the medicinal but toxic plant indigenous across the forests of North America. There are spiritual practitioners who believe the flower essence of the bloodroot plant can open us to a deep willingness to work with and heal the karmic relationships within our family and soul group (for as Hiemstra writes, “what we don’t return to the earth / our children inherit”). It is also believed this flower can root us in a deep and eternal flow of love and reverence for all people and the natural world.

Blood Root, Hiemstra’s fourth collection of poetry, investigates the poet’s spiritual connection with home, and the importance of reparations and reconciliation as a settler descended from mostly Dutch heritage (“I sing for my ancestors so loud / I drown out their answers”). Reflecting on a life lived between Sierra Leone and Canada in a missionary family (“I was given a stolen story / to understand who I am”), Hiemstra uses diary entries, artwork, and her uncanny ability to express emotion in imaginative and beautiful ways to explore questions of colonialism, reconciliation, belonging and the intimacy of death.

Hiemstra’s writing is raw and unflinching as she wrestles with the echoes of colonialism and humanity’s bruising impact on the natural world[…]

Hiemstra is also multi-disciplinary visual artist who works in a variety of mediums on many kinds of surfaces. This collection includes stills from her animations, including “Cormorant” and “The Great Blue Heron.” These multi-page spreads of black and white illustrations serve as contemplative stations throughout the text.

In three long poems, threaded with rage and remorse, Hiemstra reckons with a childhood haunted by beautiful woods and killing hands, “a universe housed in every dead body” in which “I’ve taken my father apart / to understand myself.”Author Shannon Bramer, author of Precious Energy, describes Blood Root as—

… a confession, an interrogation, and ultimately an elegy for all the broken birds and drowned kittens of the poet’s earliest years.

And friend and fellow poet Kirby, author of She and Poetry is Queer, notes—

Jessica Hiemstra offers up “a confession which makes you holy”, taking things apart—her Dutch Reformed upbringing v. the fact of having a body “drunk with wonder”—a reckoning, balancing gentleness with mercy, seeking to claim the rarest of things, communion with the living and the dead.

I found the unusual form of the book—untitled long poems flowing seamlessly through a spare and beautifully crafted river of couplets—a compelling invitation to read the entire collection in one sitting. Because Hiemstra’s writing is raw and unflinching as she wrestles with the echoes of colonialism and humanity’s bruising impact on the natural world, a concentrated reading can be an intense and unsettling experience. But because Hiemstra holds beauty and horror in equal reverence, reading these poems as a whole can also be a meditative and uplifting journey. To quote her publisher—

[at the heart of this collection] there is a relentless, unshakeable compassion for the interconnectedness of all living things as Hiemstra cuts through pretence, bearing witness to humans as they confront and connect to one another and the larger world.

As bloodroot flowers bloom in early spring, making them a harbinger of warmer days, Blood Root offers us a harbinger for forgiveness and renewal in a world where “prayer’s the bright darting / of a red-winged blackbird.”

Jessica Hiemstra is a visual artist, writer and designer. Her writing has appeared in chapbooks, essay collections, and journals, and in three collections of poetry that she also illustrated: The Holy Nothing, Self-Portrait without a Bicycle, and Apologetic for Joy. Jessica currently lives in Gunning Cove, Kespukwik, Mi’kma’ki (Nova Scotia).

Publisher: icehouse poetry / Goose Lane Editions (March 25, 2025)
Paperback 9″ x 6″ | 112 pages
ISBN: 9781773104225

Catherine Walker

Catherine Walkeris a writer/editor living on the South Shore of Miꞌkmaꞌki (Nova Scotia). A founding member of the Little Books Collective, a community-building micropress in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, Catherine is the author of two chapbooks: Short Takes: My seven-week career in the film biz (2024) and the call of many sorrows: fourteen poems (2023).