Thoughts on Milk Blood Heat by Dantiel W. Moniz
I met Dantiel at Hedgebrook and it was a pleasure to hear her talk about her process then, back in 2017. Similarly, it was a delight to read her words on the page in Milk Blood Heat, which glistens and crackles as the title suggests.
The collection is especially triumphant at exploring the least convenient aspects of humanity - our selfishness, the ways we both love our beloveds and loathe them. In my head, I refer to some of the way these scenes are rendered as being cinematic. And because I read it on my device and not print, I can’t easily refer you to the stories. That is both good and bad, I think.
What I mean by that is that too often a review quotes from a specific work without commenting on the whole. In Milk Blood Heat, what I was most struck by was the overall impact of the stories, which elevate the everyday individual’s experience to decadent detail. The waitress’s work and the ice in a glass, the truck as symbolic of a man’s pride, cigarettes as “little sticks of spite.” The one title I do remember from the digital galley, “Exotics” has the title of the collection as a little line toward the end. It was a quirky little story, a work of flash fiction about the carnal and also, I think, about overindulgence in the extreme. I like that the protagonists in most cases subvert or transcendent gender stereotypes. I appreciate the girl who grabs the genitals of a boy to avenge her friend.
It also felt very refreshing to read stories set in Florida; the humidity, the tourism, the attention to the surface of things felt especially tangible. I know at least three New Yorkers who have traveled to Florida (no judgment) recently, but I’ve personally grounded myself until I can get a vaccine and maybe not even then. So reading is the main way I’ve been traveling; another reason the collection felt so valuable.