Seldom Seen Road
by Jenna Butler
Find at your local bookstore
978-1-927063-31-6 | 2013 April | 80 Pages
ABOUT THIS BOOK
• Shortlisted for the 2014 Raymond Souster Award and the 2014 Robert Kroetsch Poetry Book Award!
• Finalist for Best Cover/Jacket Design and the Robert Kroetsch Poetry Book Award at the 2014 Alberta Book Publishing Awards!
Seldom Seen Road is a collection of sharply observed and understated poems about the land and its people, specifically those who have made it grow. Full of wit, insight, and fine bare bones imagery, they make up a book carefully constructed around a striking vision of the Prairies and its slowly disappearing history. Butler illuminates an oft-hidden world of strong women spanning two centuries, focusing perhaps the most powerful sequence of the book, “Lepidopterists”, on them.
These poems find their place in a tradition of prairie poetry that owes much to the work of such poets as John Newlove and Robert Kroetsch. Combining an exacting attention to detail with organic sensibilities, Seldom Seen Road will grow on you.
• Guest post at The 49th Shelf “Writing Your Way into Landscape”
“It’s as though she grounds herself specifically through these lost and fading touchstones, returning to each of them a strength and purpose simply for reaching out to them.”
~ rob mclennan
“These poems are almost drawn as much as written, in that their imagery is so strong, so precise, that one recognizes the deeply personal experience of nature with the universal experience of the seasons in this place.”
~ Olga Costopoulos, Canadian Poetries
“Throughout, Butler’s eyes and ears are committed to fine observation ... striking lines combine [an] aural muscularity with a delicately framed lyricism.”
~ Karen Enns, The Coastal Spectator
“The poems in Jenna Butler's Seldom Seen Road are a loving testament to the hard life the prairie demands of those who live there.”
~ Michael Dennis
“This collection is easily absorbed, and its poetic strength is lasting.”
~ Vivian Hansen, Freefall Magazine
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