The story centers on Ava and her best friend Kiera, black and white thirteen year olds (respectively), whose connection is formed on a mutual recognition of sorrow and struggling.

The titular story, “Milk Blood Heat”, sets the tone for the collection in a striking way. Moniz’s sensitivity to the female body and everything it carries, both physical and not, suffuses the stories with a deep emotional and metaphysical quality. Each story is rendered in brilliant prose, which adds remarkable depth and imagery to narratives about thirteen year-old girls obsessed with their own mortality, a young woman plunged into the depths of despair by a miscarriage, girls facing rejection from religious households, a young woman pondering pregnancy, a woman on a road trip to scatter her father’s ashes with her distant brother, and so on.

The stories mostly center around black women and girls living in the Jacksonville area, and many stories integrate the three title images of milk, blood, and heat, in visceral narratives about love, friendship, and loss. Moniz’s debut story collection Milk Blood Heat is the rare debut the strikes a perfect note with every story, all of which coalesce to an elemental and stunning symphony. These intimate portraits of people and relationships scour and soothe and blast a light on the nature of family, faith, forgiveness, consumption, and what we may, or may not, owe one another.Ī thirteen-year-old meditates on her sadness and the difference between herself and her white best friend when an unexpected tragedy occurs a woman recovering from a miscarriage finds herself unable to let go of her daughter-whose body parts she sees throughout her daily life a teenager resists her family's church and is accused of courting the devil servers at a supper club cater to the insatiable cravings of their wealthy clientele and two estranged siblings take a road-trip with their father's ashes and are forced to face the troubling reality of how he continues to shape them.Dantiel W. Set among the cities and suburbs of Florida, each story delves into the ordinary worlds of young girls, women, and men who find themselves confronted by extraordinary moments of violent personal reckoning. Moniz, one of the most exciting discoveries in today's literary landscape, Milk Blood Heat depicts the sultry lives of Floridians in intergenerational tales that contemplate human connection, race, womanhood, inheritance, and the elemental darkness in us all.

Milk blood heat by dantiel w moniz