Review of Follow This Blood to Find a Dead Thing by Charles K. Carter
Book release: January 2026 from Fernwood Press
Tension between comfortable illusion and disquieting reality animates Charles K. Carter’s Follow This Blood to Find a Dead Thing (2026: Fernwood Press). The collection of “poems and tales” blends realism and speculation to resist simulated experience and embrace the vulnerability of organic connection. Among the clearest examples is “A Trip to the Zoo,” the first of four flash fiction pieces which undergird the book’s bulk of free verse, in which a boy and his father visit a penguin enclosure in Antarctica. Speculative details gradually render a distant future in which glaciers are “ancient” history, patrons dress for “summer” weather, and the gift shop sells holograms of the exhibited animals (15). These careful choices set the stage for a final twist: as the enchanted child goes to purchase his own digital replica, the exhibit itself “flicker[s] off for the night” (16), revealing the entire zoo to be populated by holograms of the extinct. By resisting a more sensational dystopia, Carter’s vision of warning positions itself as the plausible extension of current trends such as generative AI growth, biodiversity loss, and climate change.
Several of the book’s pieces elaborate on the erasure of death centered in “A Trip to the Zoo.” The book’s second poem, “Conversation with a Grandmother,” features a speaker whose elder advises to “Never apologize for gnats or flies, dear. / That simply means there is life in your home” (14). After the speaker responds that “it can be a sign of death, too” (14), the grandmother’s blunt reminder ends the poem: “They are the same thing” (14). Later, in “Willful Ignorance,” another speaker uses the figure of carnivorous crows to confess:
I didn’t think they craved warm, fresh blood.
And maybe I don’t know crows too well,
and I’m okay not looking up the truth.
I’m okay living with my fantasy,
thinking crows are noble and not dastardly;
that the world isn’t after everything that is soft. (50)
Unlike the grandmother’s ready embrace of duality, this speaker admits to finding comfort in a “fantasy” world where predation is occluded and survival is easy. In his verse, Carter sometimes indulges this tendency to turn sharply from showing to telling. While it does make his message clear, it also lends a prosaic feel to certain poems, as if their speakers were destined for unfinished fictions cut too quickly from the vine.
In addition to the erasure of death from life, many pieces take aim at the erasure of connection from ideals of solitary survival. In “Hunted,” two sections of tercets juxtapose a bird’s collision with a windowpane and the speaker’s collision with “my own insecurities” (36). Carter’s direct voice reflects on the psychology of self-preservation, observing that “These walls were built to protect me, / to save me from any more hurt, / to shield me from any more shame. // I don’t know how to tear them down.” (37) Such glib remarks reflect contemporary fascinations with the language of therapy and the curation of self-image on social media, both of which act as buffers against the consequence and disappointment of interdependent reality. In contrast, Carter offers poems such as “Resilience,” which uses static lyricism to indicate a deeper connection beneath perceived barriers:
Our vision is blurred, beautiful one.
By imaginary limits and boundaries, we cage ourselves.
We are simply beasts with inflated egos.
There is no border that separates you from me.
There is no hierarchy that separates you from the elk.
There is no separation.
There is no separation.
There is no separation.
Only oneness.
Only love. (46)
The blunt instruments of assertion and repetition replace illustration, bringing to mind the convention of hand clap emoji on the Internet to emphasize a point (There 👏 Is 👏 No 👏 Separation 👏). By telling much and showing little, this speaker once again leaves the fiction to take up the slack.
Carter delivers in “Sump Pump,” five pages of prose that form the book’s longest and most haunting tale, about a family of four whose dysfunction and survival are intertwined. An abusive father, quiet mother, teenage son, and infant daughter share a home in a rural area prone to severe flooding, often isolated inside for weeks at a time by impassable roads. The basement sump pump is the only thing that protects their shelter from destruction; the father is the only one who knows how to maintain it, regularly spending hours wading into the basement for repairs. After repeatedly witnessing his mother become the victim of physical and sexual assault, the son protects her by murdering his father on a rainy night, asking aloud: “who’s the alpha now?” (61) Immediately afterwards, the story’s final line grimly foreshadows the destruction of the home: “In the morning, water was seeping into the kitchen from under the basement door” (61). The quandary faced by Carter’s characters can be read as allegory for modern life: profoundly antisocial behavior may mask interdependence, but does not erase it. Collective survival requires more than choosing sides.
The book’s most dynamic and illustrative verse uses natural imagery to explore the same vein of dangerous masculinity upon which the plot in “Sump Pump” depends. Poems like “Taxonomy” portray malignant fathers as environmental features, comparing them to poison ivy (“one leaf for his abandoned child, / one leaf for his abused daughter, / one leaf for his neglected mother—”), a gympie-gympie or suicide plant (“His poison lingers in the body for years, / driving you insane”), and more. Similarly, “Willful Ignorance: A Gay Scavenger Hunt,” an abecedarian composed of animal species in which gay behavior has been observed, asserts the natural quality of LGBTQ+ bodies. Some poems directly examine animal predators, such as “Chew On This,” which opens with “Sometimes one must become a man-eater to survive” (52) before detailing several species in which the female kills her mate. Others examine human predators, such as “And He Said He Wouldn’t Have a Gay Son,” a sickening portrait of a father who murders his son for being gay. Carter’s efforts with this theme degrade any neat line between human and animal life, subsuming both into chains of cause-and-effect which transcend the individual subject.
Regardless of which illusion is targeted, Carter’s work points continually towards acceptance: of self and others; of the natural world’s dangerous beauty; of the ugly necessities of survival. As the speaker of “Interloper” states: “I want to find a way to belong in this wilderness. / Even if it is to feed its beasts of prey” (39). In an increasingly holographic world—social media feeds, manufactured consent in mass media, unrealistic pornography, AI-generated facsimiles of human creativity, and more—work such as Follow This Blood to Find a Dead Thing is a welcome reminder that authentic vulnerability’s reward is worth the risk.