What does it mean to grow up too soon and still find a way to bloom? In this intimate and expansive
debut collection, Chioniso moves through childhood, loss, love and becoming, with a voice that is
both deeply personal and unmistakably African. These poems carry memory as a language the body
refuses to forget. Moving between Bulawayo, Johannesburg and the silent interiors of the self, the
architecture of inheritance: of mothers and grandmothers, of homes that breathe, of nations that
fracture and endure, is traced with precision. Grief is stitched into walls, simmered in pots of sadza,
carried in the marrow of names. Girlhood ripens into womanhood beneath jacaranda trees and love
learns to survive in the smallest, most ordinary acts. With striking imagery and a voice at once tender
and unflinching, this collection explores what it means to grow up in the shadow of loss, to rebuild the
self from memory, and to belong. To a body, to a family, to a country still becoming. These are poems
of lineage and longing, of learning how to carry the past without being buried by it, and of the radical
act of continuing.

~Samantha Rumbidzai Vazhure, Poet

This collection of poems feels like home, the warmth of the familiar disrupted by an undeniable and
raw grief. Chioniso is a genius. Her technical skill is unquestionable, but the vulnerability it took to
create this work is what truly sets •Blood•joy• apart. “Ropafadzo”, only Chioniso could make words
bend in that manner.

~Tinashe Tafirenyika, Poet

What does it mean to grow up too soon and still find a way to bloom? In this intimate and expansive
debut collection, Chioniso moves through childhood, loss, love and becoming, with a voice that is
both deeply personal and unmistakably African. These poems carry memory as a language the body
refuses to forget. Moving between Bulawayo, Johannesburg and the silent interiors of the self, the
architecture of inheritance: of mothers and grandmothers, of homes that breathe, of nations that
fracture and endure, is traced with precision. Grief is stitched into walls, simmered in pots of sadza,
carried in the marrow of names. Girlhood ripens into womanhood beneath jacaranda trees and love
learns to survive in the smallest, most ordinary acts. With striking imagery and a voice at once tender
and unflinching, this collection explores what it means to grow up in the shadow of loss, to rebuild the
self from memory, and to belong. To a body, to a family, to a country still becoming. These are poems
of lineage and longing, of learning how to carry the past without being buried by it, and of the radical
act of continuing.

~Samantha Rumbidzai Vazhure, Poet

This collection of poems feels like home, the warmth of the familiar disrupted by an undeniable and
raw grief. Chioniso is a genius. Her technical skill is unquestionable, but the vulnerability it took to
create this work is what truly sets •Blood•joy• apart. “Ropafadzo”, only Chioniso could make words
bend in that manner.

~Tinashe Tafirenyika, Poet