Jenna Butler
Alt text: Jenna Butler is smiling and posed before an office backdrop. To the camera left, the background has a bookshelf of books. The right side shows a blank wall. Dr. Butler has short hair, wearing a black shirt with indigo blue scarf, and black and blue bead earrings that goes down to the shoulder blade.
Biography
Dr. Jenna Butler is a queer BIPOC writer and off-grid farmer living in the boreal forest of northern Treaty 6.
Butler is a poet, essayist, editor, and teacher. She is the author of three poetry collections, Aphelion (2010) and Seldom Seen Road (2015) from NeWest Press, and Wells (2013) from the University of Alberta Press; an Arctic travelogue, Magnetic North: Sea Voyage to Svalbard (2018) from the University of Alberta Press; and two collections of ecological essays, A Profession of Hope: Farming on the Edge of the Grizzly Trail (2015) and Revery: A Year of Bees (2020) from Wolsak & Wynn. Revery was a finalist for the 2021 Governor General’s Literary Award in Non-Fiction and a longlisted title for CBC Canada Reads 2023. Butler received a Lieutenant Governor of Alberta Emerging Artist Award and three Canadian Authors’ Association Exporting Alberta Awards, and was shortlisted for the Stephan G. Stephansson Award, the Banff Mountain Book Awards, the High Plains Book Awards, the Raymond Souster Award, and the Salt and Bridport Prizes.
Rooted in community, Butler mentors online and in person. She is the 2023-24 Environmental Writing Fellow for the Spring Creek Project and Oregon Wild, and a 2024 Yaddo Fellow.
Poetics Statement
“So much of poetry is connected to community. We do the writing alone, but we’re always working within a larger circle, speaking to the poets whose collections we love, whose writing lives in us as surely as our own words do. We’re in conversation with the work of our peers, too, as we speak out together about the focal issues of our time, and with our readers in the give-and-take flow that forms their understanding of a text.
The longer I work as a writer, the more interested I am in poems that are unafraid to look deeply into our shared humanity by peeling aside thick scrims of privilege. I want to engage with work that is rigorous and unafraid in its looking. Perhaps this desire for close seeing is a function of being a grower and a seedkeeper, part of a diverse community of people who live and work with the land. I desire to lean into the privilege of land-based work, and into the crucial need to attend closely to complex and changing relationships with this earth.
My poetry is anchored in the land, in the intimacies of relationship with place through the climate crisis, and in the desperate need for a diversity of voices on the land and in Canadian literature. I’m interested in queering literary and environmental spaces, writing along and exploring/challenging the lines between the human and more-than-human.”
Sample of Poet's Work
Robbing Day
What is a country but a life sentence?
-Ocean Vuong
The mistake is in being certain
of sweetness. That anything
might be earned for keeps.
Our arms welted ablaze
through bleached cotton,
suits and veils failing magnificently
to block the bees’ distress.
It’s August; it’s America.
The field hospitals have shuffled off
down the conduit of pandemic memory,
the bodies sheaved, the workers plangent,
a surfeit of alfalfa, tall yellow clover.
What did they expect would happen?
We are all of us open for business.
Catch them midafternoon,
distracted by the sun’s gauze,
the first powdered goldenrod
dawdling along the verge. The trick’s
all in the movement. Come in slow,
with a blitheness that belies
how much they have to lose.
Distract with smoke, with sugar.
Finesse your opening line,
a convincing patter. They’ve been aloft
just long enough to be thoroughly sold
on the engine of their own labor.
Swap white cane for honey,
dole out fat pads of candy, the hives
left thinking themselves flush.
That’s all it takes: a sweet prestige.
Whisk something away with sleight of hand,
return it seeming unchanged. A trick,
a hive, a harvest, a country.
As though our lives were worth
the salt of their blood, even then.
(Published online as part of the League of Canadian Poets’ Poetry Pause, 2023)
Vigil (Estevan, Saskatchewan)
what must be watched for
blind feeder roots on
the geraniums in the cellar
this more than anything
on winter's outward crawl
first parsnips the thin
red haze of duststorm
wildfire cottonwoods
weighted down with orioles
& the way
light hunkers over the old thresher
rusting into earth
out on the east quarter
this blue & that
viridian night arc of sky
hawks that follow
the combine swath &
spindles of crows in
unrelieved black
baler faltering to silence
on the back forty
how panic thrums like wings
(From Seldom Seen Road, NeWest Press, 2015)
this rain
brings with it the scent of rain-soaked lilac, lemon lily. Bruised
skirts of thunderclouds drop their wet hems over this prairie. It rains
and the ditches brim, rains,
and the water rises like ire amongst the willows.
What we say and do not say. The heart
incandescent, riverine with distance.
***
lilt like this: sound
of droplets from leaves
gift gift gift
(Published in Dusie #13 by rob mclennan)