Milk Blood Heat

DEBUT Moniz has won multiple awards for her individual stories, and this excellent debut collection shows why. Focusing on marginalized communities and limning relationships, longing, and our uneasy passage through a world that often confounds us, she nails aching moments of naked human emotion in direct if luscious language. A woman unable to recover from a miscarriage is plagued by strange visions often featuring the lost child’s body parts. A teenager rebels against her pastor’s veiled aggressions, refusing to attend church while trying to help a troubled sibling. A man whose wife is dying of cancer must face her coolness toward him and his own shortcomings. And a 13-year-old Black girl struggles with a wayward white girlfriend in a story that ends in tragedy. While many story collections suffer from a sameness of theme, character, or plot, that’s not a problem here. The tales are generally set in Florida, but the similarities end there; each entry is distinctive in its premise, and each will surprise the reader in a different way. What gives the collection coherence is Moniz’s distinctive vision.