Hope Wabuke writes poetry the way weather moves through a landscape — beautiful on the surface, with deep systems underneath. Her second full-length collection, Blood on the Leaves, arrives November 3 from BOA Editions, and readers can preorder it now ahead of publication day. Wabuke, the daughter of Ugandan immigrants, is the Susan J. Rosowski Associate Professor of English at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, and her work has earned fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Fulbright Foundation.

BOA describes Blood on the Leaves as a searing and lyrical collection exploring the intimate, haunted relationship between Blackness and the natural world. In Wabuke’s poems, nature is at once a site of refuge and of rupture — a witness. The book traces how the legacy of slavery lives on in land, in the body and in family, weaving history, science and personal story into poems about resistance and survival. Pulitzer Prize winner Jericho Brown has called the collection “a chronicle of survival,” and BOA says it presents Wabuke “at the height of her poetic power.”

The new book follows her first full-length collection, The Body Family, and the chapbooks Movement No. 1: Trains, The Leaving and her. Alongside the poetry, Wabuke is a working critic and essayist whose writing has appeared in Guernica, the Los Angeles Review of Books and NPR Books, where her reviews champion other Black writers. Two of her poems appear in the October issue of Poetry magazine — a fitting runway for the collection’s arrival.

Pictured here in a frame from her own Instagram, unboxing books at home the week her copies arrived, Wabuke is launching the collection in person, too, including a November 4 conversation at Francie & Finch Bookshop in Lincoln. Blood on the Leaves asks readers to look at the ground beneath American life — and to notice what is still growing there, and what it cost.

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