Sky Tongued Back with Light

Snared between dream-like myth and harsh recollections of growing up, Sky Tongued Back with Light probes the sites of violence, beauty, and transformation that punctuate a boy's childhood and adolescence in the rural, northern Midwest.

Sifting memory's scattered fragments to interrogate grief, gender, and the fragility of family, Sébastien Luc Butler's poems navigate landscapes both physical and spiritual. Steeped in the voice of myth and images of the otherworldly, these poems move through personal and collective silences towards self-actualization and love.

Examining a culture that teaches violence to the self as the basis for violence against others, this collection holds still those moments where the corporal and incorporeal converge with lasting impact.

“What in this world isn’t a hand/isn’t a knife,” writes Sébastien Luc Butler in his stunning debut, Sky Tongued Back with Light, setting the scene for the book’s exploration of the darker sides of masculinity in America’s rural heartland. In a landscape filled with hawks, deer, anti-freeze, gun oil, thin hunting dogs, highway strip clubs, trout, and cicadas, these poems rise above the fray as luminous offerings. Here, beauty, and particularly beauty in nature, can set us free. “What trees do we stand inside of without knowing?” the poems ask, each line a wonderful/terrible tremulous song, lifting everything up. This book is exactly what American poetry, and all Americans need right now. All of us are “not becoming, but coming out of” — and in these brilliant and utterly necessary poems, Butler has created a door for us, opening into an “unending sky” of promise, a way forward into a gentler world."
–Sarah Messer, author of Dress Made of Mice