KALEIDOSCOPIC QUILL

Butterflies flutter prettily, sip nectar, beguile onlookers, spark love affairs, and lead souls to heaven in this poignant collection.

Editors Schwartz and Smith have gathered 42 short stories and poems that explore the impact of these delicate insects on the human mind. Some works celebrate and mourn their evanescent beauty, like A.N. Griffith’s “The Book of Wings,” about a daughter refusing to put her mother’s butterfly collection in her grave because “the thought of the butterflies never seeing light again was more unbearable than the thought of Mom being in the dark forever.” Casie Bazay’s fizzy romance “How Penelope Found Her Wings” has a restaurant server driving her car and braking hard for a swallowtail butterfly, only to be rear-ended by a handsome entomologist who specializes in the study of bees. Rebecca Linam’s whimsical Dragnet pastiche, “Butterfly Net,” follows two small-town detectives investigating the theft of a net and some columbine plants, which points to a kidnapping. Several pieces explore the caterpillar-to-butterfly transformation as a symbol of human change and renewal, including Paul Goat Allen’s tale “Chrysalis Rock,” which tells of a dying man who becomes encased in a cocoon and awakens to find the world wholly changed. Some pieces are infused with a magical quality in which dancing color erupts into everyday life, as in Jinxie R. Thorne’s poem “Painted Lady,” but sometimes the works fade plangently like fragile wings crumbling to dust. The best stories turn lepidopteran memes into intense drama, as in Kelly Grabovac’s “A Moth to a Flame,” a retelling of the Psyche myth from the perspective of Psyche’s sister Pythia, who longs for the love-god Cupid and bitterly resents the contrast between Psyche’s iridescent gossamer wings and her own drab moth wings: “Pythia grabbed two fistfuls of delicate, shimmering membrane, and tore. And tore. And tore. Psyche’s screams did not deter her. Pythia focused only on the glittering shreds of wings fluttering to the harsh rock beneath them.” Readers who are butterfly enthusiasts—and who isn’t?—will find this a captivating browse.

A luminous meditation on Earth’s loveliest creatures and people enchanted by them.