Blood Loom, by Ellie Howard

Poetry, chapbook, 32 pages, from Bottlecap Features. Blood Loom details the two years surrounding my move to Minneapolis from Georgia due to transphobia and political violence. My fiance described this chapbook as “missin’ the south and bein’ queer about it.” A close friend described it as “like Bernini statues lounging in a shitty linoleum kitchen watching something fry in the skillet.” Currently, it feels like I’m the one being fried up. All of these poems are a reflection on family, and how they can muddle what home means. I have trouble writing a description of this collection; what I would like to say has been said much better by my poems. The collection is titled Blood Loom because it sounds good when I say it out loud. I suppose it ties into themes of family, religion, nature, and suffering. As someone who injects herself weekly to change her appearance and hormone levels, it also plays into some cool biohacker tropes. I hope these poems serve as a call to action. Since I first read Rilke’s sonnet “Archaic Torso of Apollo”, I have heard him daily whisper in my ear: “for here there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life.” Ellie Howard is a queer poet from the south taking refuge in Minneapolis. She was “suspended indefinitely” from editing Wikipedia after removing trans peoples’ deadnames, and she hopes her writing carries a similar attitude. She explores themes such as queerness and family through distortions of nature; all of her poems are ultimately about home.