Red Ants

LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD

This bold and genre-defying prose debut by the prizewinning poet incorporates social, historical, and supernatural elements to create a collection that is both contemporary and timeless, communal and deeply intimate

Kimberly Blaeser’s singular stories center Anishinaabe characters who bring traditional tribal stories into contemporary experiences and break the stereotypes too often used to portray them. Here, we experience an Indigenous America inhabited by fancy dog contests, social protests, tree doctors, monsters, mosquitoes, and facial recognition software, all while blending, in the most exciting ways, the genre elements of magical realism, humor, horror, and speculative literary fiction.

At the heart of the collection is the story “Red Ants,” which opens on the rez between a jump rope chant and a test proctor’s smile, where two girls learn how easily a life can be reduced to numbers, and how quickly those numbers can tilt ordinary days into something mythic, unsettling, and deeply human. Blaeser delves into the complexities of kinship and survival, exploring how the smallest moments of cruelty or tenderness can shape generations.

For readers of Night of the Living Rez and Crooked Hallelujah speaking to larger issues of race, culture, and history, Red Ants explores alienation, displacement, and loneliness elevated through the precision of language, fierce emotional intelligence, and the haunting sense of place that permeates every page.