Painters use the term "fugitive pigments" to describe those colours most prone to fading after a brief exposure to light. In Self-Portrait Without a Bicycle, poet and visual artist Jessica Hiemstra uses the idea of fugitive colour to explore the grieving process; whether her subject is a lost grandparent, language, child, painting or cat, Hiemstra renders the fleetingness of life with fine, delicate strokes.

"The poet listens, tastes and remembers, senses afloat, dipping into the pastand then surfacing again, drawn by a perfect but fleeting moment." - Descant

Jessica Hiemstra is an award-winning artist, writer, and designer. Her writing has appeared in chapbooks, essay collections, journals, and in three full-length poetry collections that she also illustrated: The Holy Nothing, Self Portrait without a Bicycle, and Apologetic for Joy. In 2018, Hiemstra won Toronto’s My Entertainment World’s Outstanding Set and Costume Design award for her work on Shannon Bramer’s The Hungriest Woman in the World. In 2021, she received second place in Brush and Lyre’s Palette Poetry prize for her multimedia entry, “Cormorant”, an animation of cormorants in flight over Lake Ontario/ Niigaani-gichigami. Some of these drawings appear in Blood Root.

Jessica Hiemstra's profile page

"Hiemstra is masterful as she blends together art, memory and sense."St. Catharines Standard

"The poems themselves-free-verse stanzas whose titles are almost always composed of subject and verb, and whose sentences often overlap with the first lines of subsequent sections-dart in and out [of] narratives ... [and] are strongest when the narrative stakes are highest ... tender and convincing." - EVENT