Zimbabwean poet Chioniso Tsikisayi has published her debut collection, Blood Joy, through Carnelian Heart Publishing, available now in paperback and hardback. Tsikisayi is part of the Brittle Paper community and took part in the debut Brittle Paper Literary Festival, and watching her reach this milestone is exactly the kind of moment we love to share. From her earliest poems in our pages to a Brittle Paper Spotlight feature to this debut collection, we’ve been glad to walk alongside her journey, and that’s what Brittle Paper is all about, showing up for the writers who grow with us.

Tsikisayi’s relationship with Brittle Paper goes back years. Her work first appeared on the site in 2021, starting with the essay “Sesame Street: Musings of a 20 Something Year Old” and poems including “Planting is a Heavy Thing,” “I Want to Fall Apart Quietly,” and “The Last Time You Went to the Supermarket,” the same year she was featured in a Brittle Paper Spotlight interview as an emerging writer to watch. She returned to our pages in 2022 with “I Am Growing Older but So Are the Trees” and again in 2024 with “Cease-Fire.” Most recently, in 2025, Brittle Paper covered Bureau De Change, her experimental short film fusing poetry and filmmaking. Blood Joy marks the natural next step in a body of work we’ve been following since the very beginning.

The title is an alchemy of its own: Blood Joy renders the Shona word Ropafadzo, meaning “blessing,” into English, and the collection sets out to trace joy as it’s distilled through the bloodlines of a family and a nation. Across its 112 pages, the poems move through childhood, loss, love, and becoming, carrying memory as something the body itself refuses to forget. The collection shifts between Bulawayo, Johannesburg, and the quieter interiors of the self, tracing an architecture of inheritance — mothers and grandmothers, homes that breathe, nations that fracture and endure. Grief gets stitched into walls and simmered into pots of sadza; girlhood ripens into womanhood beneath jacaranda trees; love learns to survive in the smallest, most ordinary acts.

The book carries blurbs from two fellow poets. Samantha Rumbidzai Vazhure calls the collection “poems of lineage and longing, of learning how to carry the past without being buried by it, and of the radical act of continuing.” Tinashe Tafirenyika is just as direct about the writing itself: “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.”

The cover art was designed and painted by Chitende Fine Art.

Congratulations, Chioniso, we can’t wait to see where this journey takes you next!

Blood Joy is available now from Carnelian Heart Publishing and Barnes & Noble, with paperback and hardback editions both on offer.