Tag: LGBTQ+ Fiction

Sundress Reads: Review of Follow This Blood to Find a Dead Thing

Sundress Reads

Charles K. Carter’s Follow This Blood to Find a Dead Thing: Poems and Tales (Fernwood Press, 2026) is an explorative, alluring collection of flash fiction, vignettes, free verse, and more. Divided into four sections, the book transforms a vessel of ecopoetics into an examination of human relationships, sexuality, and mental health. Carter’s sophomore release paints pictures of stunning, overgrown, and lustrous landscapes while simultaneously tearing at the most heart-wrenching and isolating aspects of the modern experience. 

In Follow This Blood to Find a Dead Thing: Poems and Tales, the author’s interest in what they were writing about stood out immediately. Writing about animal and plant life so cleverly requires a fundamental understanding of the named specimens. Early on, it is clear that Carter has a true affinity for nature. Their fascination is tangible on the page, from visual allusions to orchids and willow trees to vibrant references to gnats and grasshoppers. Their enthusiasm for these ecological subjects made the collection all the more compelling, as I was eager to learn more about how they could transform this knowledge into poetry. 

See, from Part I, an excerpt from the poem entitled “Blooming”: 

“Many native prairie flowers grow close together / to help each other carry the weight of the world, / to help each other stand tall” (Carter, 22). 

It is true that prairie flowers tend to congregate. It is an evolutionary response to surviving in areas with high winds. To root their imagery in truth, the author needs to have a concrete understanding of the nature that they are referencing. Carter does. That attention to detail strengthens their writing and forms trust between the reader and the book.  

Throughout this collection, Carter uses facts like those about the various flowers in “Blooming” and intermingles them with potent metaphors. They utilize natural examples of destruction and perseverance to argue for the same possibilities in human life. It was imagery that I understood and was easily able to relate to. What I did not know, I researched. Then, I was able to apply that concrete visual allusion to the picture of my own friend group and the collective support I feel through their presence. In that, Carter’s writing, despite being very emotionally-driven, is simultaneously scientific.  

Often, these grounded metaphors lead to a feeling of observation. Many of the poems read like hypotheses, long mulled over after following and evaluating a creature in its natural habitat. 

“An ant, used to relying on her colony to survive, / will purposely leave her home if she is infected with a disease” (Carter, 38). 

Then, a stanza later… 

“One of my coworkers / Couldn’t even be bothered to wear a mask for ten minutes in Walgreens” (Carter, 38). 

Often, emotions like aggression and territoriality are attributed to having an “animal instinct.” Carter subverts this notion, challenging readers to think about the sense of community and altruism that exists in the animal kingdom. At the same time, the author is also turning a spotlight on the greed and self-interest that have created division between people in the last few years. Can selfish interests be chalked up to an animalistic instinct, or is it also true that community building and preservation are innate qualities?  

The thing that most often captivates me about Follow This Blood to Find a Dead Thing: Poems and Tales is the contrast. Within a short excerpt, not only can you feel the author’s admiration for the ant, but you can also feel their disdain for the actions of their fellow humans. By placing these two examples in opposition, especially considering Carter’s affection for nature, it becomes clear what their standpoint truly is. 

Yet, despite this frustration, much of the collection is still about humans and human moments, whether fictional or not. In particular, the flash fiction of this collection showcases truly human relationships, dialogue, and actions. They are moments shared over dinner, in old houses, or on a day out. They are between lovers, friends, or family. Whether comforting or unsettling, the conversation still revolves around human life. It is aggravating, humiliating, and captivating all at the same time. It is one more outlet for the author to confront trauma, heartbreak, and loneliness as humanity struggles to find its humanity.  

Finally, in Part IV of the collection, the human comes face-to-face with nature, entering a conversation where they reckon with their impact on the natural world. In Earth’s last moments, a human speaks to an eagle, whale, cockroach, and dog. The penultimate piece solidifies the ecological, anthropological, and political message of the collection. It is a call to action. 

From “The Last Night on Earth”: 

“What a lonely night it would be if they still pretended not to / hear one another” (Carter, 72). 

Now, the character of the human must finally contend with what the human author has been urging them to hear all along. And, as a reader, the most important thing this collection did was encourage me to listen. I hope others will, too. 

Follow This Blood to Find a Dead Thing: Poems and Tales is available from Fernwood Press

Reina Maiden-Navarro is an editor, writer, and photographer. She recently graduated from UC Irvine with a degree in Film & Media Studies and a minor in Creative Writing, cum laude. She also works as an Editor at Prompt and an Outreach Coordinator at Bookstr. If she is not reading or writing, she can be found traveling, painting, or baking cookies.

Sundress Reads: Review of Cup & Dagger

A row of 17 mini-chapbooks on a white background.
Photo: Sword and Kettle Press

The Cup & Dagger mini-chapbook series transports readers through 17 diverse stories, all published in tandem by Sword and Kettle Press. Swinging from experimental horror and poetry to fairytale retellings and fantasy, these stories harmonize through the emphasis they put on women, trans, and nonbinary experiences, using the fantastical as a vehicle for understanding. It’s this centering of underrepresented voices beyond the binary that makes these mini-chapbooks important and like few others. In society, we too often prioritize male voices and stories; but in this series, a diverse range of female, trans, and nonbinary voices is offered, fearlessly calling out the treatment of women in society and the standards we hold them to, while delivering a commentary on our treatment of the environment. Each no more than 12 pages, they contend with body issues, model culture, male cruelty to nature and women, and so much more. These mini-chapbooks dare to imagine worlds where women unite in grief, women help each other through times when they are shunned by the world, and where love is always valid. This way of storytelling, combined with depth of emotion and experimental ways of writing, is what makes this series worth amplifying.

In an innately heteronormative society, the works in this series decimate boundaries; in the six mini-chapbooks featuring romance, love is love, a desire for romance isn’t required, and queer romance is celebrated. Women find peace and harmony with wolves and androids, with women and men and no one at all, and each romance—or even shunning of romance—is no more or less valid than any other. For example, Encounters with Wolves in Three Acts by Shreya Ila Anasuya gives power to queer love while simultaneously relegating gender in love to irrelevancy with the story of verdant love and acceptance between woman and wolf in the woods at the center of an unforgiving concrete city. Corporate America, patriarchy, homophobia, and the rigidity of an artificial city are contrasted against nature, nurturing, and play, cradled by a family of wolves in the deep woods in the center of the city, as woman and wolf find love even as they find themselves pulled apart. Although the wolf is mentioned as female, ideas of gender can’t be fully projected onto this romance since we cannot assume that our ideas of gender correlate to those of wolves. In this way, the gender of the wolf becomes almost irrelevant, perhaps showing the irrelevance of gender in relation to love.

The impossible standards for women’s bodies, the dark side of the beauty industry, and the vagaries of modeling are illuminated as well. In A Hole Walked In by Sarah Cavar, a woman bleeds from every orifice, streaming from eyes and nose and mouth in great vision-staining rivulets that are dismissed as unconcerning by all that see her. While bleeding in the mall, a modeling agent “solicits me like a street preacher cries hellfire. I pretend I have been waiting for him my whole life […]. You have the look, he tells me.” Her body seemingly becomes not her own, something for display and something to be ashamed of, to stuff and pinch and beat into submission as she emerges into the modeling industry. The blood gushing from her face, clotting in her lungs, becomes a casual talking point as the damage that is occurring to her body (perhaps a metaphor for internal wounds) is normalized as a part of the effort to be pretty. The way that this story shines a light on how we bleed for a society that cares nothing for our health, with the hope that it will value us for our emaciated bodies, is vital. This mini-chapbook and others unapologetically challenges our society and forces the public to reckon with the harm intrinsic in the beauty standards we hold for women.

Dealing with themes of death, patriarchy, and love beyond barriers, the mini-chapbooks in this series often return to one unwavering truth; in our darkest moments, it’s often nature and each other who can save us. We find each other despite all odds. Sometimes, these characters unite in love; other times, they escape together from a world not meant for them, build new homes, save each other’s lives, or sew each other back together. Mothers warn daughters of men and sailors while nature provides them a home, as in The Seawalker’s Flame by Rebecca Payne, and female sirens teach a drowned woman how to live again with nature, as in No One Saw Ophelia Drown by Grace Noto. But there is not always a path through the darkness. At times, women shop alone in psychedelic post-apocalyptic grocery stores reminiscent of the work of Kelly Link, as in Bury Me In Iron and Ivy by Monica Robinson; live forever gaslit by male society about their own body, their comfort found in men only temporary, as in Take Care When Made of Glass by Rachel Brittain; and sometimes there is nothing left but to stand together with the soul-wrenching music of grief, as in Our Ballad in Soil by Bisola Sosan.

In this way, by providing a balance of support and disorientation, love and grief, this series shows women, trans, and nonbinary folks in glory. I wish that in this time of intersectional feminism it had gone even further; I’d like to see a continuation of the series which includes an even more vibrant array of inclusion. But the current collection still does something vital in that it encourages women supporting women, validates women’s struggles, centers their voices, and encourages acceptance of all people. Every Cup & Dagger mini-chapbook is worth reading, with tales ranging from those of unusual creatures inspired by Chinese-Malay myths from Singapore, to vanquished love and mortuary work in Russia, to burning ballerinas and the things we do for our image. With these implications and this broad coverage of tales around the stories of women, the voices of these micro-chapbooks echo and stay with us far beyond the page. Much like the haunting voice of the singer in Our Ballad in Soil, the voices of these writers “would go on until those ashes in the ground felt satisfied. We would keep humming with [them].” And perhaps we will use them to build a better feminist society.

The Cup & Dagger mini-chapbook series is available at Sword and Kettle Press

A young white woman with short bleached hair and octagon glasses stands before a green background. She wears a collared shirt, gray sweater, and blue lace top.

Solstice Black (she/they) is a queer poet and novelist living in the Pacific Northwest. They are currently undertaking a bachelor’s degree in creative writing. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Chautauqua, The Fantastic Other, and A Forest of Words, among others. They hope to pursue an MFA in creative writing and a BFA in visual art in the next few years. Her cat is both her greatest joy and torment.