Poetry in Motion: Jessica Hiemstra + Blood Root

Jessica Hiemstra on Blood Root:

Blood Root includes stills from my films. My films are animations that begin as forms of slow and personal attention – I make hundreds of drawings to share a brief moment (a minute, or less) of motion. From drawing to drawing I notice what my eye misses because of how fast our world moves: the pulse of a cliff swallow’s wing, the plunge of a heron’s head for a fish, a red-winged blackbird haranguing a raccoon. Ballets too fast to see without slowing them down. I write and draw for the same reason: to slow down.

In this book I needed to look closely at myself, my own blood. I wrote this book because I needed to grow; this required excruciating closeness with my history. The collection is arranged in couplets that are like frames in my films; each couplet is a single moment but when the couplets are read one after the other there is a collection of hundreds of still and personal moments that coalesce into one singular movement.

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Jessica Hiemstra is an award-winning artist, writer, and designer. Her writing has appeared in chapbooks, essay collections, journals, and in three full-length poetry collections that she also illustrated: The Holy Nothing, Self Portrait without a Bicycle, and Apologetic for Joy. In 2018, Hiemstra won Toronto’s My Entertainment World’s Outstanding Set and Costume Design award for her work on Shannon Bramer’s The Hungriest Woman in the World. In 2021, she received second place in Brush and Lyre’s Palette Poetry prize for her multimedia entry, “Cormorant”, an animation of cormorants in flight over Lake Ontario / Niigaani-gichigami. Her newest collection, Blood Root, includes poetry and her animation.

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Blood Root is available now, here or from your favourite indie bookstore.

For more Poetry in Motion, click here.