Blood Tejido

For readers of adventurous, politically alert poetry, these border-crossing poems test what the lyric can hold.

“What does thread conduct?” In Blood Tejido, Dora Prieto blends poetry, textile practice, and lyric essay to trace a girlhood shaped by Colombia, Florida, rural Canada, and Mexico. Across three sections and recurring “Tejido*” sequences, this audacious debut collection braids aerial maps, embroidery, bilingual play, internet debris, and hybrid forms into poems alive with questions of gender, spirituality, technology, and inherited violence. Through monostich poems, lyric essays, and visual sequences, Prieto treats mapping and stitching as both material practice and ways of thinking.

Witty, erotically charged, and sharply alert to borders, brands, and the pressures of media language, these poems remain rooted equally in body and speech. By turns devotional and profane, tender and defiant, Prieto moves through bloodlines, labour, migration, and desire with formal restlessness and exacting intelligence, asking what can be mended, what resists repair, and how identity is made and unmade across generations. For readers of Jen Bervin, Ariana Reines, and Tommy Pico.

*Spanish for fabric, tissue, or weave