Bloodsongs

Shifting between English and North-east Scots, Bloodsongs is an ode to matters of the blood: queer carnality; black rage; the crude power of myth; and how history is felt in the body. Offering retellings of legends and biblical stories as well as perspectives on injustices faced today, Mae Diansangu’s radical debut collection marks the arrival of an exciting new voice in Scottish poetry.

Reviews of Bloodsongs

“Diansangu’s poems clot beautifully under your skin, the words rolling your tongue to break complicity and silence. These poems bite with wet, sparkling, granite teeth. The coloniser’s scalpel turns to mirror. White fragility, heteronormativity and (petro)patriarchy are called out. A dousing of Scottish humour leans in. Ink sings, steeped in defiant voices, as Diansangu splits binaries into multitudes, from misbehaving and ‘monstrous’ women, to gay Jesus, to childless mothers, to existing while Black. The body is continually evoked in language, shape and sound, pulling form from that slippery, fluid space into a vital debut collection.” – Jeda Pearl

“Bloodsongs is a powerful debut packed with poems that delight and sting in equal measure. Diansangu disrupts colonial and heteronormative conceptions of the past by giving voice in Scots and English to queer, Black and feminist perspectives that have been overlooked for far too long. An essential read.” – Shane Strachan

“Bloodsongs is relevant and retrospective with a fresh twist, these poems are anthems of queerness, love and rage. Savour the calm and the storm as this collection steals your heart and churns it in an emotional washing machine with fierce veracity and tender care. This book doesn’t feel like a debut collection – Bloodsongs has always been here.” – Jo Gilbert

“Playful and precise, Diansangu dances between moments of humour and deep luminous observations of what it is to inhabit a Black body and witness a history of colonialism rearing its ugly head around the globe. But in this collection, despite its heavy subject matter, so much lyrical hope prevails, ‘we are calling this the catalyst / a change is going to come / the answer is seething in the wind’. Diansangu’s rich poems will only add to this rightful shift of whose histories are told.” – Andrés N. Ordorica