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Bloodletting a Butterfly
Paperback
Publisher Price: $13.99
Publisher: Atmosphere Press
Published: Oct 14 2025
Pages: 124
Weight: 0.34
Height: 0.29 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.50
Language: English
Bear witness to a world reshaped by trauma, disfigured by grief, and strangely illuminated by the grotesque poetry of survival.
Told in raw, unflinching verse and framed by a chilling interview-style prologue, these poems don't seek resolution or redemption. Instead, they offer something rarer: truth without anesthesia. Hood's language is evocative and uncompromising, at times surreal, at times starkly literal, always purposeful. Whether imagining a ferryman ferrying infants into fog or cataloging the dismantling of his own senses, Hood never shies from the horror that shaped him-or from the beauty he still aches to protect.
This is not a book for the faint of heart. It is for those brave enough to stand at the edge of unspeakable loss and listen. Because somewhere inside the carnage, there is still a heartbeat.
--
Bloodletting a Butterfly by Alec B Hood, illustrated by Feather Hazel, is a daring work that is so unlike anything else I have read. It is written entirely in theatrical, almost stage-scripted dialogue in language that pulses with originality, carrying us into scenes that shift between the surreal and the startlingly concrete. It's incredible how poetically Hood pits us against encounters with insects embedded within, blood transformed into living things, and surreal rituals involving leeches, tarantulas, and tarot cards. Each moment is rendered with dark imagination. Hazel's gorgeous hand-sketched charcoal illustrations heighten this experience, anchoring the words in artwork that feels raw and unforgettable. Together, text and image create a book that feels alive, offering an experience that is entirely singular and impossible to forget. - Readers' Favorite
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. - Independent Book Review
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