{"id":4700,"date":"2025-11-04T12:06:00","date_gmt":"2025-11-04T12:06:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/?p=4700"},"modified":"2025-11-04T12:06:00","modified_gmt":"2025-11-04T12:06:00","slug":"starred-book-review-bloodletting-a-butterfly","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/?p=4700","title":{"rendered":"STARRED Book Review: Bloodletting a Butterfly"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Bloodletting a Butterfly<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

by Alec B. Hood<\/p>\n

Genre:<\/strong> Poetry<\/p>\n

ISBN: <\/strong>9798891328266<\/p>\n

Print Length:<\/strong> 124 pages<\/p>\n

Publisher:<\/strong> Atmosphere Press<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Reviewed by Mandy Bach<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong>Visceral, devastating, and brilliantly gory<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Alec B. Hood\u2019s Bloodletting a Butterfly<\/em> places readers in the grief-hazy head of a speaker completely preoccupied with death and dying. We bear witness to the speaker\u2019s near-synesthetic empathy through poems intent on creating raw, physical images.<\/p>\n

Still-born infants, roadkill, ghosts, and brutalized birds populate the world of this collection, and Hood\u2019s 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, \u201ca 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.\u201d<\/em><\/strong> The collection is filled with images like these ones, animalistic images that facilitate horror and intimate surprise in equal parts.<\/p>\n

Bloodletting a Butterfly<\/em> is cut through with a transcript conversation between a surgeon and a potential patient. They discuss the patient\u2019s 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\u2019t 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\u2019s obsessive relationship with suffering.<\/p>\n

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Hood expertly uses surreal descriptions of the body to help readers understand the disturbing nature of this preoccupation with suffering and death. He writes, \u201cthere are insect eggs \/ embedded in my esophagus \/\/ parasites peering \/ through my pupils \/\/ my lungs \/ flooded with webs \/\/ my blood \/ blinking with lightning bugs.\u201d<\/em><\/strong> 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\u2019s speaker while he\u2019s holding onto his grief for the world.<\/p>\n

Hood\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s speaker has \u201cmounted [his] muse on meat hooks,\u201d<\/em><\/strong> 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. \u201cit is such an ugly process,\u201d<\/em><\/strong> Hood writes, \u201cto produce such beautiful poetry.\u201d<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Bloodletting a Butterfly<\/em> is a collection of beautifully ugly poetry, viscerally physical in nature, and violently emotional in practice. I thoroughly enjoyed my time with these poems.<\/p>\n

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Thank you for reading Mandy Bach\u2019s book review of Bloodletting a Butterfly <\/em>by Alec B. Hood! If you liked what you read, please spend some more time with us at the links below.<\/p>\n

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The post STARRED Book Review: Bloodletting a Butterfly<\/a> appeared first on Independent Book Review<\/a>.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Bloodletting a Butterfly by Alec B. Hood Genre: Poetry ISBN: 9798891328266 Print Length: 124 pages Publisher: Atmosphere Press Amazon Bookshop Reviewed by Mandy Bach Visceral, devastating, and brilliantly gory Alec B. Hood\u2019s Bloodletting a Butterfly places readers in the grief-hazy head of a speaker completely preoccupied with death and dying. We bear witness to the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":4701,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4700","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bookreviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4700"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4700"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4700\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4701"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4700"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4700"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4700"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}