Milk Blood Heat

“Milk Blood Heat is a seething excavation of want and human error. Moniz writes about the hard incongruities of intimacy with great urgency and tenderness.” — Raven Leilani, author of Luster 

“These stories and the characters that drive them are like lightning—spectacular, beautiful, carrying a hint of danger. Dantiel Moniz is a brilliant new talent, her writing lush and sharp, her landscape so rich it feels we could step into it, her characters so alive and full of longing that they might step of the page and take the reader with them wherever they’re headed next. Milk Blood Heat is a stunning and important debut.” — Danielle Evans, author of Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self

A livewire debut from Dantiel W. 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. 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. 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.  

A 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.

Wise and subversive, spiritual and seductive, Milk Blood Heat forms an ouroboros of stories that bewitch with their truth, announcing the arrival of a bright new literary star.

• Publisher: Grove Press (February 2, 2021)
• Language: English
• Hardcover: 208 pages
• ISBN-10: 0802158153
• ISBN-13: 9780802158154
• Item Weight: 1.74 pounds
• Dimensions: 5.5 x 8.25 inches