“’Pink is the color for girls,’ Kiera says, so she and Ava cut their palms and let their blood drip into a shallow bowl filled with milk…” begins the title story. Moniz continues to challenge the reader with each of the eleven pieces. The worlds in these short stories are so specific that any distance is absolved in the first sentence. The characters’ journeys of transformation are always unexpected.

You may need to sit back with eyes closed after each narrative to recover before diving in again. Set in a steamy Florida, each of the eleven stories offers the reader a full immersion into one world after another. Like Torres, Moniz’s settings are based in concrete detail and her stories open questions about human nature. Enthralling in simplicity and grounding in the details of her reality, Milk Blood Heat is kin to We the Animals by Justin Torres. In these challenging stories by Moniz, each character is altered by basics - death, birth, desire. A bright element in our literary sky, Moniz has several upcoming online events accessible through her website. Most recently, she was one of ten finalists for the highly coveted Princeton Arts Fellowship. Moniz has been weaving words in publications such as One Story, Paris Review, Tin House, and Ploughshares since 2017. Moniz, as elemental is to summon the chemical definition of the term, to invite the reader to imagine an elixir that acts on the spirit as well as the body.

To describe Milk Blood Heat, a new collection of stories by Dantiel W.

Milk Blood Heat by Dantiel W. Moniz