Psychology, philosophy, art, and life’s stranger-than-fiction moments alchemically collide in The Alchemy of Blood.
“I don’t trust things / that don’t rot”
Understanding humanity is never confined to a single discipline. With The Alchemy of Blood, LaBrie presents a collection that is unafraid to bite into the rawness of being alive. Organized around the four alchemical phases of Nigredo, Albedo, Citrinitas, and Rubedo, the book explores shame, rage, love, and violence through the lens of transformation, drawing heavily from LaBrie’s own work as a psychotherapist. The result is a collection that asks readers to consider how decay, healing, and renewal exist within ourselves and within humanity as a whole.
“Crusty eyelashes, I awaken young in a seat – car or plane? / The searing afternoon ochre blinks me. / Are we there yet?”
Rather than telling a single story, The Alchemy of Blood traces an emotional and psychological progression. The poems move from darkness and dissolution into moments of clarity and awareness, eventually arriving at a sense of wholeness that remains uneasy and unresolved.
LaBrie treats human depravity and vulnerability not as moral failures but as necessary parts of growth, though not always one’s own. Life in these poems is always in motion. People change through harm and care, through memory and forgetting. Even despair is not stagnant but something lived through, a phase rather than an endpoint. The collection suggests that the highest virtue may be found in becoming either a child or a cat, creatures defined by curiosity, hope, and an intuitive understanding of chaos theory.
“Validation did not matter – I was already gone / Drifted into my own viciousness / Setting a course to fail them / The salted slime blood of revenge an ethical misfire”
The alchemical structure gives the book a strong backbone while still allowing LaBrie to experiment freely. Written in freeform poetry, the collection draws from a wide range of influences, including psychoanalysis, philosophy, economics, and literary tradition. Jung, Freud, Voltaire, Stafford, Pound, and even Evel Knievel appear throughout the work. These references never feel like name-dropping. Instead, they reflect the way meaning is made through unexpected connections and lived experience. Form itself often becomes part of LaBrie’s inquiry, with poems that challenge how we read and how we understand our role as readers.
“But in that moment I understood the torture / of managing the healing of something in our other”
One of my favorite poems, “Qualitative Data Collected at Parnassus,” personifies poetic stanzas as participants in a study of the poets who created them, blurring the lines between writer, subject, and reader. The poem “Apology” is printed sideways, physically forcing engagement by requiring readers to turn the book or tilt their heads. These choices remind us that writing and reading are not passive indulgences but acts of participation.
Throughout the collection, LaBrie balances moments of uncomfortable oversharing with passages that demand careful interpretation, much like the process of psychotherapy itself. Through his use of ars poetica (i.e. poetry written about poetry), LaBrie offers insight into how to live by examining the act of living itself.
“And fades into the dark / To disappoint himself away / from the vibrancy / Of risk”
The Alchemy of Blood is not an easy book and is often jarring due to its inclusion of viscerally triggering subject matters such as sexual assault, child abuse, suicidality, and violence. These moments may be difficult for some readers. Still, they feel purposeful rather than merely crass. LaBrie seeks to capture human existence as it actually is, and that honesty requires a careful balance of both ugliness and grace. Those willing to enter this collection with open minds and open hearts may be rewarded with a final message that a life worth living is one to which we can and must answer a resounding “yes.”
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