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This book is nothing short of an epiphany. It takes you to the raw edges of existence, where nature’s beauty and our fear of losing her blend into a powerful sense of dread and reverence. I also found myself profoundly connected to its exploration of queerness as it navigates love, loss, and survival within a world that can feel both breathtaking and brutal. Every poem and tale felt like an invitation to reflect on my place in this vast, fragile world, and it moved me to consider the depth of my own connection to our planet, the creatures here with us, and all the other humans who have impacted me over the years-for better or for worse. This collection sparked emotions I didn’t know I was holding onto and walked me from my yearning to live a brilliant beautiful life to all the fears that I suppress and run from on a daily basis. A true tour de force of the emotions we all need to feel and engage with to heal. This is a book I’ll return to again and again, always finding tears glistening down my face when I get to the penultimate poem from the author and the oracle.

–Timothy Arliss Obrien, author of Wild Queer Magic

In Follow This Blood to Find a Dead Thing, Charles K. Carter offers a meditative-often haunting-exploration into the heartfelt and heart-breaking complexities and contradictions of how we live in nature and with fellow creatures. He offers his poems and stories as a shaman might use parables to show us the ways of our wanton destruction and trauma on a global and personal level but also the healing and restorative powers of the heart and finding our ancestral roots deep in the earth. “We are lonely hunters scavenging the fluid boundary. / We feel the current within ourselves. / We want to dive into each other because we are single drops of the same vast sea.” These are inventive, beautiful poems and stories told with a soft but powerful voice. And as we seemingly race headlong in extinction and a human-centric existence, these sublime and deeply honest pieces do offer hope and shed light on the untamed wildness of the world within and without.

–Sarah Rohrs

Queer questions of nature, evolution, and family riddle these essential poems by Charles K. Carter in which decay is sexy, and the oracle gives our world a childless ending instead of a new, unwanted Eden. Apocalypse and ecstasy mix. If you Follow This Blood, as the title poem wants you to do, expect to find crows hunting baby squirrels and blue octopi strangling their mates. But these poems don’t merely disturb. They agitate as much as they educate us about queerness thriving in every branch and web.

–Michael Walsh, editor of Queer Nature

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