A review by laura_sackton
Bless the Blood: A Cancer Memoir by Walela Nehanda

This is an intense memoir in verse about Nehanda's experience with cancer as a young nonbinary Black person. It’s powerful and tough. There's all the physical pain and trauma, and there is so much medical racism, and there's also so much interpersonal stuff, abuse from their bio family, complicated feelings about their partner. I really loved these parts, where they speak about how much they love their partner, the love and care they found together, the beauty of Black queer love and the home they built together, and all the really tough parts—ways their partner didn’t support them during cancer, fights they had, ways the relationship turned toxic, ways their cancer changed the relationship. It's a beautiful queer love story but it does not have a happy ending. It’s about how trauma changes you, about dealing with and facing that change and becoming someone new in the process. It honors the love that didn’t remain the same without romanticizing it. 

The audio performance was great and I also loved the nonlinear format, how they jumped around in time, writing poems about their family, falling in love, being in the hospital, ongoing pain, money, gender, dealing with the system, their anger, their hurt, finding pockets of joy with their partner and friends, writing poems, being on the internet—all of this while they were in treatment for cancer, so it’s ongoing and immediate. It doesn't go from Point A to Point B. It's a jumble of: here are some things I felt and dealt with. 

I also thought a lot about memoirs in verse and how I feel different about them than poetry. This poetry did not wow me, it’s statement-forward/straightforward, doesn’t do the language joy I love, but I found this book so moving anyway, and I think part of it is that I want different things from a memoir. I sometimes like memoirs to make sense and tell a story, whereas what I often want from poetry is for it to destroy sense, or at least make things more complicated. I want it to make me feel a certain way. Whereas while I love when memoirs that do that, it does not feel like the core of the form for me. So I was so happy to just experience this journey and hear Nehanda's voice, the anger, love, power, exhaustion and queer joy in their voice.