Blood on the Leaves

Blood on the Leaves by Hope Wabuke is a searing and lyrical poetry collection that explores the intimate, haunted relationship between Blackness and the natural world. At once a site of refuge and rupture, nature emerges as both witness to generational trauma and a space of beauty, survival, and fierce possibility.

Hewn from historical record and personal experience, these poems unearth the brutal legacy of slavery and the enduring persistence of systemic racism, tracing how violence echoes through land, body, and bloodline. Wabuke weaves history, science, and the environment into the personal—examining gender, motherhood, identity, and the Black body as sites of resistance and remembrance. 

Blood on the Leaves stands as a powerful testament to the Black experience, survival, memory, and the enduring power of love.

Praise for 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

Excerpt from "Blood on the Leaves"

Blood on the Leaves

Sometimes I think how impossibly

green it is here on the prairie
and beautiful—grasses bursting vibrant and trees

lush limbed along paths, the branches of one entwined

high above with the branches of another
in line with another and the next, vaulting the whole

world into a cathedral of green

that nearly veils the wide expanse
of blue only the sky above the plains

can fishbowl into forever.

I am not from this place. I arrived from somewhere

else a decade ago. But this greening,
long enough to seem it was always, is not

from this place either, planted

by the people who came here just before me and took
by force what could not be thefted—plunging into reddened

earth with iron still bloody

from a thing you cannot call war
when the mission was to make the people who were

here before us both into the disappeared.

Do you know

that scent, so sweet, grass

gives when cut? It is not just

for enjoying. It is a distress call, to all

growing things, that death is coming.