Victoria Hood’s Destroy Me, Desecrate My Bones (Girl Noise Press, 2026) is a hybrid collection that shows how a build-up of unsettled yearning can break a person down. In a mix of grotesque, obsessive, and confessional voices, Hood’s writing pulls you deeper into the spiraling decay of being in love. Split into six sections, Destroy Me, Desecrate My Bones begins with trying to cling to love before the subsequent sections turn to consuming, reshaping, and surrendering to the damage. I focus on the first two sections, “To Contain” and “To Devour,” to track the transition from clinging to consuming.
What strikes me about the prose piece “I’m Sorry We’re Getting Married” in “To Contain” is that it is entirely about her, even if it obsessively focuses on their connection. We never hear Harry’s voice, yet by the end she seems to feel her questions have been answered, and she closes with “see you at the wedding in July.” I keep wondering how much time sits between her writing this and seeing him, and whether he ever hears any of it. The piece fixates on “I love you, Harry,” and nearly every time she says it, an insecurity or another thought about why it wouldn’t work follows. Reading it, I found myself asking: if you have to repeat it this many times, do you truly love him, or are you trying to prove to other people the marriage is right for the two of you? Each declaration reads to me like a battle over which matters more: the lover she holds close, or the people watching. Even so, the close, “I think I’ve answered my question,” feels like she’s trying to force an ending rather than letting it happen naturally.
“I want to feel you drip down me” in “To Devour” mixes intimacy and eroticism in the most grotesque way you can imagine. But then it turns from “I want” to “I don’t want,” and the tone shifts from erotic to haunting: the speaker wants to “clean off the world” from their partner “before you enter the house,” insists, “I don’t want you to die,” then wipes them down and licks them clean “before the sacrifice can begin.” It tips from kinky to ritualistic quickly, and the “sweet and sticky” substance in the beginning is called honey but reads as bodily, especially with “before your insides can come out.” Both readings, a kinky couple and a cannibalistic one, end up being about the same thing: being known by someone so completely that you consume them and hear thoughts you can’t normally. The impossibility of getting inside someone’s head is turned literal through the possessive care of stripping off shoes, clothes, and germs to keep their lover safe, but also isolating them from the rest of the world.
The prose in “How are you?” in “To Devour” is where the collection shifts; there is a stark volley between “The Girl” and “The Best Friend.” They think about the other often and reminisce about each other, yet neither says anything. It is the most poignant compared to the previous poems in the collection because it’s so relatable to friends drifting apart when both are going through difficult things at the same time. The line that resonates with this the most is when you hear The Girl’s interiority: “It is hard to do well when you are nervous that your wellness is not as important as someone else’s.” When one friend is doing better, and the other one is struggling, there are social scripts with clear roles to fall into. But when both care deeply despite their separate struggles, they can’t tell who fits which role, and the confusion can create more distance, as it does here. Even at this distance, the grotesque hasn’t left. “Neither of them wants to climb inside each other, they are both scared to bring up the insides” mirrors earlier poems that try to consume the person the speaker cares about. Here, the same imagery becomes emotional intimacy they can’t risk, so the merging of their bodies appears as a fear of being that close.
Reading Hood’s collection, I came away feeling that the search for love and connection never actually ends. It keeps pushing deeper until it can’t be contained, and the book’s sections follow that path from “To Contain” to “To Spill Over.” Her narratives are messy and grotesque, and refuse to be cleaned up neatly. Intimacy arises, fails, and sometimes succeeds, and the book treats all of it as love that needs to be honored because it is difficult and uncomfortable to face. Often the love isn’t even heard by the other person, and the poems suggest that being heard may not be the most important part of feeling connected. Even though Hood writes love as something that cannot be held in, I felt held by her work. It captures the weird, sad girls who cry over everything and never had a place to put those feelings. Now we can set them down in her collection.
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Emma Flores is an undergraduate student at Binghamton University studying English. They have a particular interest in researching human behavior and society through storytelling, with a focus on cultural narratives and folklore. In their free time, Emma can be found doing tarot readings, wandering bookstores, or hunting down spiritual shops for the next deck to add to their growing collection.
