Winner of the Spring 2024 Black River Chapbook Competition

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.

Publication Date: March 3, 2026

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  • From “a field wet with cricket song,” Sébastien Luc Butler spins this intricate and astonishing work, which contemplates the complexities of family; the mysteries of nature; and the power of memory. I admire Butler’s keen attention to seemingly small, everyday details which become cosmic when lifted into song: latticework, black walnut shells, stars. Rich with sonic and visual textures, these poems push into intense lyric registers, “like the tearing apart / of an atom as it hurls you into light.”

    Kiki Petrosino, author of White Blood: a Lyric of Virginia and Bright: A Memoir

  • Whether concerned with the casual cruelties of boyhood, the complexities of masculinity, the wages of mortality, or the redemptive power of romantic love, these sonically gorgeous poems “take place” in the body, the mouth—that is, their physical evocations of place are inseparable from the soma and vice versa. Most often, the terroir inhabited is the American Midwest, our continent’s fecund and mysterious heartland, and by extrapolation, the (lonely, longing, vulnerable) body, which is the heart’s land. “There’s a moon, / jaundiced in harvest. Inside me, bruises like clouds // pulling back to reveal the same unending sky,” writes the speaker of “Origin.” With the poems in this collection, Butler brings a fresh, provocative new voice to the poetry of place.

    Lisa Russ Spaar, author of Madrigalia: New & Selected Poems

  • “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

COMING SOON

Viscera

Butler’s debut full-length collection, “Viscera”, including poems featured in “Sky Tongued Back With Light” and more, is set for release with Four Way Books in Fall 2027.