Blood Bible : An American History

In her most ambitious work yet, NAACP Image Award-nominated author DaMaris B. Hill considers Black identity and the inescapable weight of American history.

America's monuments and anthems are pervasive hornets swarming about my ears . . .

When DaMaris B. Hill thinks of home, she thinks of America, its monuments, its anthems, and the weight of its history. Just as her ancestry is bound up with the trans-Atlantic slave trade, so is her personal identity inextricably tied to these United States. This is a kind of double-consciousness, a cleaved sense of allegiance, a hornet's nest at every haven.

Blood Bible inhabits the swarm. Interweaving memory with national mythology, family stories with national history, Hill traces the Bermudan slave trade system to her mother's immigration, her country's religious history to her pastor father's congregation, her own military service during the 9/11 attacks to the financial crisis servicepeople faced returning home.

In the process, Hill learns how her own story and her country's are inextricably linked. The result is an account, sometimes scathing and desperate, musical, and always unflinching. Blood Bible is a reckoning with ancestry, home, and national identity from one of the country's finest poets.