Upon the release of their debut poetry collection Bloodroom, author Kay E. Bancroft spoke with Sundress Publications editorial intern Ruoyu Wang on the form and visual structure choices in their collection, the complex ideas around lineage and breaking cyclical trauma, and the significance of naming.

Ruoyu Wang: Can you speak to the way “m___r” is represented on the page and its significance  to the collection?  

Kay E. Bancroft: This term recurs a lot in the collection, and I ultimately decided to redact the  middle of it and follow this visual structure for two reasons: 1. I wanted readers to “fill-in-the blank” for themselves, to give them the agency to insert a term that feels correct to the situation  of the speaker or of themself as the reader. One intended word here is “mother,” one of the main  relationships and traumas explored in the collection, but as I wrote I also realized that “monster”  and a slew of other terms could fit within this structure. 2. I didn’t want to give a full title to  subjects in the collection that don’t feel entirely there, that have a level of absence.  

RW: How do ideas around knowledge, identification, and naming develop as you grow into  yourself? 

KEB: Growing into yourself is such a difficult and delicate process in life, and I’m not sure we  entirely ever finish doing it. We’re constantly growing and evolving, learning more and retaining  the knowledge of complex and beautiful situations. With more life experience comes the ability  to identify and name not only things about yourself, but also to notice and name the roles of  others around you and the relationships you hold with one another.  

RW: In pieces like “white Blooded” and “Google Search Keywords for Sensitivity,” how does  your use of form and punctuation inform the poem’s content, or vice versa?  

KEB: These poems both have unique origins but ended up living in similar formal universes  because they both needed the same thing: an untethering from something.  

When writing “Google Search Keywords for Sensitivity” I was reading Camonghne Felix’s  collection Build Yourself a Boat, and was thinking a lot about vulnerability, queerness, and  understanding the meaning of being parentified at a young age, so when I saw this form, it felt  like kismet. The technical elements of a Google search provided a structure to ask a lot of  questions, to pause, to create space and breath within the poem as it would look in the mechanics  of a search engine. It also allowed the speaker a bit of distance in these urgent inquiries, these  seekings for a name. 

“white Blooded” was the reverse—the content came first, and as the speaker is moving through  the reckoning of cutting familial ties and creating something new, there was a need for division.  Not only was the verbiage dense on the page but it was dense to digest, and I realized the speaker  required physical space to move through this heavy processing. The pronouns needed to be  separated to visibly cut the speaker from their biological connections, to find what they needed. 

RW: Interspersed throughout the collection is a series of “[lexicon] defined” poems. How do  they connect to each other?  

KEB: Each of these poems is an erasure of a dictionary listing for terms that feel inherently connected to the ideas of familial relationships and complex parent/child relationships,  specifically debt, heritage, legacy, obligation, and privilege. 

RW: Can you speak to the recurring images of not only body parts such as hands and skin, but  also messier parts, such as entrails in “Derivation” and splayed muscle in “LBD”?  

KEB: There’s such tenderness and intimacy that arises with images of hands and skin – holding  hands, intertwining fingers, soft caresses, bruising hair off a cheek. Not only are they physically  soft and delicate, they’re also often used as symbols of vulnerability and femininity, which are  frequently poked at throughout the collection. I see them pushing the question are they  symbolizing softness or strength? which lends itself to the horror element of the book. In  “Derivation” specifically, hands and entrails are paired as a gruesome duo, and I see this as a  moment where two kinds of softness in the body intersect in a more visceral way. 

RW: How do your poems work to navigate the present in regard to the past? 

KEB: The poems in Bloodroom explore a searching, a reflection, and a questioning that is  uniquely identified by the context of the events, relationships, family history, etc. that occurred  before the collection begins, with the speaker hoping to answer “how do these traumas, these  monikers, these relationships define me and how can I break the cycle.” They look back to see  what’s transpired to inform the speaker’s future, the next steps they can take to name that which  feels unnamable at the beginning. 

RW: Tell me about the questions of lineage and inheritance that are in this collection. 

KEB: As people we’re all trying to figure out how what’s come before us has affected us, and  how we might affect others as we move through the world. The speaker of these poems is trying  to decipher their own lineage and understand how trauma has carried through generations, what  they’ve inherited from their ancestors, and how they can break certain cycles of behavior to  protect not only themself, but future generations potentially perpetuated by them and their  chosen family.  

RW: In “Burning Haibun for a Half-Life,” you write, “I came up emptier than I began.” How  does this idea of fullness versus emptiness develop as you age?  

KEB: I’m not entirely sure if it’s a development as we age, but maybe more of an understanding  as we move through different seasons and situations in life. There are certain times where we  seek answers and despite gaining information, things make less sense, and we are forced to  radically accept what just is. It’s a moment where we have to embrace where we are in the  current moment. There are others where we get to know everything we’re hoping to and have  total clarity. Fullness versus emptiness is situational. 

RW: Can you speak about the use of photographs and archival material in this collection, and  how they punctuate the different sections?  

KEB: When I started writing Bloodroom, I was beginning my MFA at Randolph College at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, and I had borrowed a box of photographs, audio  recordings, and letters that were sent between my grandmother and grandfather while he was  working overseas. I wanted to start cataloging and digitizing the materials so they didn’t get lost  to time, and as I did, I found the military ID application form that ended up becoming a major  part of the collection dubbed the ‘Applicant’ series. It felt like such a malleable document, a  place to play and work via the prints quite literally left by someone who meant a lot in my own  life, an open yet structured page playground. I started experimenting with this particular artifact  and it became integral to the collection, serving as a guidepost throughout as the speaker delves  into different identifiers, relationships, etc.  

The photographs included in the collection are also from my family archive, one of my  grandmother, and many of myself as a child. These punctuate the collection less regularly, but  still allow for a small window into the different media we use to explore our personal and  familial histories. 

Bloodroom is available to purchase on the Sundress website

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Kay E. Bancroft (they/them) is a writer, editor, educator, and artist based in Cincinnati, OH. They hold an MFA in Poetry from Randolph College and a BA from the University of Cincinnati. Their writing has been published in Poet Lore, Pleiades Journal, RHINO Poetry, and more. Their debut poetry collection, Bloodroom, (Sundress Publications, 2026), was a finalist for the 2025 Alice James Book Award. You can find them on most social platforms @keb.poet and on their website at kayebancroftpoet.com, experimenting with hybrid visual poetics, facilitating literary workshops and discussions, and obsessing over popular horror films. 

Ruoyu Wang (they/them) is a writer from Seattle. Their poems appear in Sine Theta Magazine, COUNTERCLOCK, and The Shore, and have been recognized by YoungArts, The Adroit Journal, and Narrative Magazine, among others. Currently, they serve as the Founding Director of the SUNHOUSE Summer Writing Mentorship and study Critical Race and Political Economy at Mount Holyoke College. They love linguistics, postcards, live music, and jasmine milk tea.

One of the first books I was deeply affected by was William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. Reading it in an early year of high school, I was struck by the narrative style and how it showed the universal experience that all we know is shaped by all we’ve already known. This fascination and obsession with perspective only grew from there, since playing a remarkable role in the books I love most. 

Today, the favorites on my bookshelf still lend themselves to this defining characteristic, but they sit alongside many others as well. Political theory books, research books from my undergrad, books I received as gifts, and aspirational books that I haven’t gotten around to yet. For me, books are one of the only things I’ll allow myself to buy whenever I wish. This has created the effect that often, when I want something new to read, I can go to the library that I’ve begun to curate of books I want to read but haven’t yet. 

One of those classics on the shelf is Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, which was the next memorable book I loved. For similar reasons as Faulker’s book, the fragmented, post-modern narrative resonated with me. One of my all-time favorites on the shelf is Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns. Wilkerson’s work tells the story of the Great Migration, but tells a true history through the individual stories of three different migrants. Her extensive research and detailed storytelling have the effect of recounting a major shift in American history through poetic narrative. What provoked me about Wilkerson’s book was also what provoked me about my more contemporary favorites: the use of individual experience to exemplify the effects of living through history and political change.

Currently, I’m obsessed with books and genres that live mostly in reality, with a tinge of magical realism. Sometimes, these are the classics, like Isabel Allende and Julio Cortázar. One of my favorite short stories is “Apocalipsis de Solentiname,” a short story by Cortázar which explores dark magical realism and political unrest. However, László Krasznahorkai’s The Melancholy of Resistance achieves something akin to this feeling of magical realism in its own dark but insightful world. Krasznahorkai paints an apocalyptic world. He does so not in a broad setting, but in nuanced details of how his characters feel and see; the apocalypse isn’t something that hits them all at once, but a state of emotion and divinity that they live under. 

I love this apocalyptic writing for the same reason that I love magical realist writing: I understand these worlds with little tinges of fantasy and strangeness as much more akin to the world we live in now than a more “realistic” fiction. These edges that are colored differently, a world that is painted to be almost too vivid, resonates more with the great miraculousness, but also the great catastrophe, of the real world. These tinges of fantasy reflect something sacred in human life, whether you want to call it divinity, emotion, or the human experience.

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Leila Tilin (she/her) is an aspiring writer and researcher, and she holds a BA from Pitzer College, where she studied American Studies and Spanish. She has a particular interest in writing and learning about the intersection of religious belief and politics. Tilin finds this convergence to be at times detrimentally dangerous, at others, astoundingly hopeful. She is interested in literature as a means for inquiry into belief systems and as a mode to participate in the creation of meaning in the world.

The Sundress Academy for the Arts is excited to present Poetry Xfit hosted by Rosa Castellano. This generative workshop event will take place on Sunday, July 26th, from 2 to 4 pm EST via Zoom. Join us at the link tiny.utk.edu/poetryxfit

Poetry Xfit isn’t about throwing tires or heavy ropes, but the idea of confusing our muscles is the same. You will receive ideas, guidelines, and more as part of this generative workshop series in order to complete three poems in two hours. A new set of prompts will be provided after the writers have written collaboratively for thirty minutes. The goal is to create material that can be later modified and transformed into artwork rather than producing flawless final versions. The event is open to prose authors as well!

The theme for July’s Xfit is “Snippets.” Before this month’s Xfit, try to keep your ears open. Bring along a few snippets of overheard dialogue or conversations to spark ideas for new poems. If things have been quiet in your life, a favorite lyric or literary line will do just as well!

While this is a free event, donations can be made to the Sundress Academy for the Arts here.

The Sundress Academy for the Arts (SAFTA) is a writers residency and arts collective that hosts workshops, retreats, and residencies for writers in all genres including poetry, fiction, nonfiction, journalism, academic writing, playwriting, and more.