Blood on the Leaves

“The title of Hope Wabuke’s most recent book, Blood on the Leaves, hearkens back to what may be considered Billie Holiday’s most political song. And like Holiday, Wabuke’s voice here is relentless in its subtleties and distinctive in its vulnerabilities: ‘What is normal is this: I want to love you,/dearest, like love is still a normal//breathing thing to believe in…’ This is a one of a kind collection of poetry, a chronicle of survival.” —Jericho Brown, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and author of The Tradition

“In her second collection, Wabuke is unflinching, asking us as readers to join her in not looking away from the difficult and timely subjects the poems trace, including domestic violence, misogyny, racism, migration, and environmental collapse. The elegiac mode holds sway in this moving collection, in which personal and public histories converge in searing lyric-narrative poems. ‘In the silence/the wind through the trees is the shaking of ghosts’ the poet declares, in one of the title poems and crown of sonnets that highlights Wabuke’s formal power. But perhaps more than any other measure, Wabuke’s truth-telling voice is the singular force throughout this collection, speaking into the ‘silence’ that threatens to undo us and confronting the ‘ghosts’ of history, memory, the land, and the body.” —Shara McCallum, author of Behold

“Blood on the Leaves presents us with Hope Wabuke at the height of her poetic power, writing poems of deft architecture and deep wisdom, born out of a deeply examined life. Wabuke has long established herself as a poet whose vision of America is enhanced by her position as an immigrant whose poetic vocabulary is embarked on perfecting the language of this country’s imaginary. In Blood on the Leaves, Wabuke writes with the authority and grace of a poet who dares to be vulnerable in her fierce commitment to truth-telling. We need to pay keen attention to Hope Wabuke.” —Kwame Dawes, author of Sturge Town

Hope Wabuke is the author of two full-length poetry collections, Blood on the Leaves (2026) and The Body Family. She has won fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Barbara Deming Memorial Foundation, and the Fulbright Foundation, among others. She currently serves as a consulting editor for the African Poetry Book Fund and Susan J. Rosowski Associate Professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She lives in Lincoln, NE.

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