An Autopsy: Poems, by Hunter Bloodmoon
Finally collected together in print form, Hunter Bloodmoon’s poem collection, An Autopsy, will be released into the world 21 January, 2025.
Twenty-nine lyrical works of love, loss, and the strange, wild, and dangerous power of finding your own voice.
Below is the introduction to Hunter’s poetry collection, written by Rhyd Wildermuth:
There’s a strange and wild and dangerous truth I found because of Hunter’s poems. Often when you find your own voice, others find theirs, too. Often when you liberate yourself, others get the same idea.
It shouldn’t seem so strange, really. I mean, this is technically how revolutions have always started. Someone gets tired of licking boots all the time, and finally decides to stop. Then, another person, who really never liked the taste of boots but was just pretending they did, decides that maybe they don’t have to lick them anymore, either. And then next thing you know, there are lots of people not licking boots anymore, and the ones whose boots were being licked suddenly have to learn to clean their boots on their own.
What I really mean is that Hunter’s poems are spells of contagious self-reclamation, the kind that comes from being really damn honest with yourself. Yeah, that kind of honesty can taste bitter, especially when you have to be brutally honest about flaws and sadness and especially about your pain.
But — boots don’t really taste good. Sure, we might say we like the way they taste, or that we don’t really mind licking them, but we’re not really being very honest with ourselves, are we? And then, when we start to be a bit honest about things, suddenly there’s this bitter and generally unpleasant taste in our mouth, and we make the mistake of thinking that’s what honesty tastes like. But really, that’s just the taste of the boots we’ve been licking, and honesty is telling us that we don’t really like licking them at all.
Still not convinced? That’s okay. Go read my favorite poem in this collection, All Hail The Runners. When I read it, the first few lines tasted really, really bitter:
I used to believe that
the greatest act of love
was to sacrifice
to be supple
to bend like a bridge
They all tasted really bitter because that was, at the time I read the poem, exactly what I still believed. Sure, I would have told you instead that I was sacrificing myself for “just a little while” until the abusive man whose boots I was licking realized he was being abusive. (Well, actually, I had lots of other explanations, but they were all various and really dishonest versions of “I like the taste of boots.”)
Reading that poem made me be honest with myself. Sure, it tasted really damn bitter, but that wasn’t Hunter’s fault, and that wasn’t the taste of honesty, either. It was just the taste of the boots I didn’t want to lick anymore, and so I decided to stop licking them.
Hunter has written lots of other poems with this same magic, and I’m pretty excited you’re going to get to read them. And if you notice sometimes a bitter taste in your mouth, you’re probably about to learn something really strange and wild and dangerous about yourself, too.
“…Hunter’s poems are spells of contagious self-reclamation, the kind that comes from being really damn honest with yourself.”
—Rhyd Wildermuth, from the Introduction
Finally collected together in print form, Hunter Bloodmoon’s poem collection, An Autopsy, will be released into the world 21 January, 2025.
Twenty-nine lyrical works of love, loss, and the strange, wild, and dangerous power of finding your own voice.
Read Rhyd Wildermuth’s introduction to An Autopsy here, and read Hunter Bloodmoon’s poem All Hail The Runners here.
Presale and Package Information
An Autopsy can be ordered before its publication date for 30% off with our end-of-the-year sale (use code 2024 at checkout) for delivery upon publication.
It’s also available as part of a special poetry book package. That package includes three books:
An Autopsy, by Hunter Bloodmoon
These books would normally retail together for 36 US but are available together for 28.8 US (save $7.20).
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