Reviewed by Erin Nicole Cochran for Readers' Favorite

Matt Nagin’s Butterflies Lost Within The Crooked Moonlight is a collection of poetry that speaks about all aspects of life. The voice that crosses every page feels like defibrillation treatment. It has a commanding jolt that makes the reader sit up and take almost immediate notice. One of my favorite lines and there are many within the entire book, comes from the poem Wondrous Admonition on page 13, “…wiry meth heads resembling scarecrows in the field.” His poems don’t hold back, they don’t paint pretty pictures, because life in its purest form is far from pretty. But what Nagin’s poems do express is truth and how the world is today. A few of my top favorites were At The Funeral, Inspirational Chat, and Poetry Assassin.

In Butterflies Lost Within The Crooked Moonlight, Matt Nagin delivers in stark and jarring completeness. There are no two poems that are the same. And that is one of the aspects that I love most about this collection. Each poem feels distinctly new and apart from the one before it and yet they all feel part of the same body. You can feel the frenetic energy spinning round in a spectacular fervor and slowing down at other times. It’s a steady path of pushes and pulls that will suck the reader into the moment and the sheer movement of the poem. I can easily say, without any doubt, that anyone who reads Matt Nagin’s Butterflies Lost Within The Crooked Moonlight will be affected by it, and possibly even changed for the rest of their life.