Lepidoctora, by Taylor Hagood

Poetry, chapbook, 28 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

Lepidoptera + doctor = Lepidoctora, a poetic meditation on sickness and healing in the wings of butterflies. This chapbook of poetry by Taylor Hagood prods both tragedy and renewal via an eclectic array of personal, literary, and historical contexts.

From the “butterfly brain tumor” to the regenerative metaphor of the cocoon to Muhmmad Ali’s heartbreaking descent into illness, the poems in Lepidoctora range across time, space, and societies. Here, Erik Satie appears alongside country music star Roni Stoneman, Valentino Garavani shoes sit beside butterfly knives, and magic lives with the mundane.

Through all these dimensions flit the tiny colorful wings of the lepidoptera, the butterflies and moths, that lend their quiet beauty to life’s triumphs and defeats.

Taylor Hagood lives in south Florida and has published poetry, fiction, literary criticism, biography, and true crime, including Stringbean: The Life and Murder of a Country Music Legend; Theodore Pratt: A Florida Writer’s Life; and Faulkner, Writer of Disability.