Blood Red- Gabriela Ponce

In a torrent of stream-of-consciousness fragments, the unnamed narrator of Blood Red recounts the aftermath of her failed marriage in explicit, sensual detail. She falls in and out of love, parties with her friends, skates around the city at night, does a lot of drugs, and gives in to her impulses. Her internal monologue is punctuated by bouts of trypophobia, an obsessive cataloguing of holes that empty, fill, widen, and threaten to swallow her entirely.

Blood courses through her every encounter from periods, fights, accidents, wounds, sex, streaming to and from her fixation with holes. Blood is a vibrant reminder of her physicality, a manifestation of her interiority, a link to memories and sensations—until its abrupt absence changes everything.

Provocative and raw, Blood Red is a fierce portrayal of a woman navigating the grey—or red—zones of her uncertainties and paradoxical urges. A subversive grappling with what it means to wrest power over one’s body, Blood Redrevels in the narrator’s autonomy to make choices and face the outcomes, no matter the scale.