With Bloom Upon Them and Also with Blood: A Horror Miscellany

The “f**k” count is just over sixty. The images are screenshots. The metal is mostly nu. And the grant money’s gone. From the author of The Malevolent Volume and National Book Award–winning Indecency comes a gory new mutation in the shape of nonfiction and criticism.

In 2019, Justin Phillip Reed’s romantic maiden voyage through the waters of American poetry and its communities ran aground in the barrens of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, when he found himself with two years of writing time on the horizon and no social context to keep him afloat. In anxiety and estrangement soon deepened by global pandemic, popular fascism, virtual being, intestinal distress, and the obscenity of his own privilege as a university pet, he retreated to the comforts of horror films with no intent but diversion. What happened instead was this reckless, unprecious, in-process reckoning.

Backdropped by sprawling cemeteries, soundtracked by too much Type O Negative, and totally hung up on cameras, With Bloom Upon Them and Also with Blood is a chase and a trip where lyric essays, ekphrastic poetry, and lectures grapple with alienation, professional disillusionment, perversion, and internal contradiction under racial capitalism through playful and critical encounters with horror cinema and cultural iconography.

Publication date: October 31, 2023

Format: Trade Paper

Dimensions: 5.5 x 8.25

Page count: 176 pages

ISBN: 9781566896917

Justin Phillip Reed is an American writer and amateur bass guitarist. His preoccupations include horror cinema, ideological failure, and uses of the grotesque. He is author of two poetry collections, The Malevolent Volume (2020) and Indecency (2018), published by Coffee House Press. Born and raised in the Pee Dee region of South Carolina, he participates in alternative rock music cultures and enjoys smelling like outside.

Praise for Justin Phillip Reed

“Reed blends intersectional politics and bodily hunger in precise, thorny language.”

—The New York Times

"[Reed] piles on anxious images and quasi-logical connections to create a gratifying weirdness.”

—Troy Jollimore, Washington Post

“Incendiary. With breathtaking lyrical dexterity, Reed first rebukes and then remakes western literature and myth, bringing Black queerness to the forefront. . . . Reed performs a deft sleight-of-hand to embrace the territory of horror and monstrousness—harnessing its inherent power to threaten the status quo.”

—Luiza Flynn-Goodlett, Adroit Journal

"The beast in me bows to the beast in you, Justin.”

—Marwa Helal

“Boldly and carefully executed and perfectly ragged. In these poems, Justin Phillip Reed experiments with language to explore inequity and injustice and to critique and lament the culture of white supremacy and the dominant social order.”

—National Book Foundation

“Raw, nervy, reverberant, densely packed language whose import simply can’t be reduced to easy explanation. . . . One-of-a-kind brilliant.”

—Library Journal