bleeder.

bleeder. is a collection of poems that refuses to look away. Jake Zimkiewicz crafts a book that moves through grief, desire, faith, violence, memory, and survival with an unflinching, intimate voice that feels both confessional and confrontational. These poems do not seek resolution they sit inside the wound, tracing its edges until something human emerges.

Across pieces like "sunday forever," "family tree," "party favor," and "apple," Zimkiewicz examines generational trauma, religious shame, childhood loss, and the quiet brutality of growing up unsafe. Love appears throughout the book, but rarely without teeth-romantic, queer, tender, and devastating all at once. Desire is rendered as something both sacred and dangerous, while intimacy becomes a site of risk, reclamation, and survival.

bleeder. is haunted by houses, streets, mirrors, and bodies that remember what the mind tries to bury. It speaks to the aftermath of abuse, abandonment, infidelity, and silence, centering the ways young people inherit damage long before they have language for it. Yet threaded through the darkness is a stubborn, aching softness: for lovers, for lost friends, for animals, for the self that endured.

This is a book about what it costs to feel deeply in a world that teaches numbness. bleeder. offers no clean healing, only honesty - raw, lyrical, and alive - written for anyone who has ever survived by bleeding quietly and learning how to keep going anyway.