STARRED Book Review: Bloodletting a Butterfly

Reviewed by Mandy Bach

Visceral, devastating, and brilliantly gory

Alec B. Hood’s Bloodletting a Butterfly places readers in the grief-hazy head of a speaker completely preoccupied with death and dying. We bear witness to the speaker’s near-synesthetic empathy through poems intent on creating raw, physical images.

Still-born infants, roadkill, ghosts, and brutalized birds populate the world of this collection, and Hood’s skill as a poet is tangible in the way he hangs onto these images, breathing new life into them through brightly alliterative description. Toward the end of the collection, Hood describes a church as, “a place of worship surrendered to the ecosystem / plants sprouted from every pew and pedestal // the alter had been adjusted to an albatross nest / and the pulpit a playground for possums.” The collection is filled with images like these ones, animalistic images that facilitate horror and intimate surprise in equal parts.

Bloodletting a Butterfly is cut through with a transcript conversation between a surgeon and a potential patient. They discuss the patient’s preoccupation with death, using the poems in the collection as an application of sorts for a kind of deadly operation. The transcript of this conversation requires readers to hold the story of our speaker and his emotional pain throughout the collection. We can’t leave him poem by poem; instead, his grieving persists with us until the very last page. Each poem, as a result, is a new piece of psychological evidence for the speaker’s obsessive relationship with suffering.

Hood expertly uses surreal descriptions of the body to help readers understand the disturbing nature of this preoccupation with suffering and death. He writes, “there are insect eggs / embedded in my esophagus // parasites peering / through my pupils // my lungs / flooded with webs // my blood / blinking with lightning bugs.” These images of insects taking up residence inside the body are unnerving; they bring a level of physicality to the experience of reading the collection that is very effective. Readers feel in their own bodies the imaginative horrors of Hood’s speaker while he’s holding onto his grief for the world.

Hood’s speaker is haunted by the pain that he sees in the world to the point of obsession. The collection features distinct and vivid elegies for adults, children, animals, and even versions of the self. The death and dying that Hood’s speaker encounters around him exist within his body sometimes as a feeling and sometimes even as a personified creature, who is shown in several of the illustrations, by the artist Feather, that are included with the poems.

The collection is interested in the ways that this relationship with death is changed or enhanced by poetry and writing. In a particularly gory poem, Hood’s speaker has “mounted [his] muse on meat hooks,” using his blood as ink until the violence is turned around onto the speaker. The writing process is depicted as horrific and murderous, while the writer is identified as a monster. Hood invites readers to consider the consequences, both emotional and otherwise, of poetic impulses. “it is such an ugly process,” Hood writes, “to produce such beautiful poetry.”

Bloodletting a Butterfly is a collection of beautifully ugly poetry, viscerally physical in nature, and violently emotional in practice. I thoroughly enjoyed my time with these poems.

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