Continuing City and Other Poems is my forthcoming poetry collection from Bonfire Books. It includes 50 pages of original poetry along with my verse translation of The Voyage of Saint Brendan. You can now pre-order a copy here.
Continuing City is a book about the longing for a world that’s “realer than the one I’ve wandered here.” It is often apocalyptic in tone, with strong influences ranging from science fiction to (as one poem puts it) “the Bible, Dante, and Tarkovsky.” These poems take you on a journey from the mundanity of the modern city through mythological mountaintops and seascapes, always in search of an enduring homeland.
The book’s mythological journey is of course most fully exemplified in my translation of The Voyage of Saint Brendan, which see its first complete publication in this book. There has been a great deal of interest in this translation since I first posted about it, with an excerpt, here. If you’re not familiar with the story of Saint Brendan, it’s wild. An Irish monk (a real historical person and a saint in the Eastern and Western churches) sails across the ocean searching for Paradise, and encounters many adventures along the way. He chats with angels disguised as birds, sails through Hell, and celebrates the Eucharist on the back of a sea monster.
The banner image above is a painting of Saint Brendan by Michael Galovic, which will be the cover image for the book.
If all goes well, Continuing City will be published on Saint Brendan’s Day, May 16, 2027. Stay tuned for more news!
“A frankly remarkable sophomore breakout, with one eye on the fourteenth century and another, augmented, on the future. Jesse Keith Butler’s excellent poems have been precision-machined to withstand incoming waves, whales, floods, second comings, custodian bots, and other soon-to-be-current events. Admirably old-fashioned and awesomely fashion forward, as if crafted by a monk with a sci-fi side hustle.” —Jason Guriel, author of The Full-Moon Whaling Chronicles
“Butler’s follow-up to The Living Law is filled with the poignant immediacy and poetic dexterity that so distinguished his previous collection. Each line reads with an absolute authenticity, whether delivered with solemnity or a mischievous twinkle in the eye. Of especial interest is Butler’s couplet-by-couplet translation and modernisation of The Voyage of St. Brendan in a version sure to delight modern readers and medievalists alike.” —Shawn Phillip Cooper, Ph.D., FRSA, Editor-in-Chief, Critical Readings
“In Continuing City and Other Poems, Jesse Keith Butler tells us the unseen sea ‘sings / how the undercurrent flings / the corpses from the crypts of kings / and lofts them up like they’d sprung wings. / Of these and other sundry things,’ and he might well be describing his own poetry. In these poems, there are the pleasures of wit and whimsy, as well as myth, prophesy, dream and the everyday — in lines often so musical you can almost hear the band playing in the background.” —Daniel Cowper, author of Kingdom of the Clock
“In the remarkably unified Continuing City, the narrator’s mid-life descent is through no Dantean dark wood but into a gray realm of databases, machines, and HR purges, its city canyons threatened by wild chaotic waters. Yet wanderers through Jesse Keith Butler’s city-scape or trampling seas may make a place for glints of grace, hoards of readerless books, radiant mountaintop, and brimming forest. Fittingly, Butler’s symbolic, significant poems wrap around his translation in couplets of the 14th-century Middle English Voyage of Saint Brendan, offering a pattern of ceaseless journey, despite all weariness, through both sea-chaos and eternal mysteries, and toward death and the enduring city of God.” — Marly Youmans, author of Seren of the Wildwood
The title poem, “Continuing City,” won first prize in the inaugural ESU Formal Verse Contest, judged by Stephen Edgar, winner of the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry. Stephen Edgar said the following of “Continuing City”:
“What struck and impressed me about this poem was the way the form to some extent enacts the content. The formal regularity of the iambic pentameter and the strict rhyme scheme—both handled with skill—are shaken and pulled apart by enjambment and sentences which lie at odds with that rigid grid, mirroring the disruptions to the city’s stable forms by demolition and construction. Repetition of key words creates a sense of urgency, or even panic, and, literally rising above the damaged cityscape, the poem builds to a dystopian vision of the future.”
Listen to me read “Continuing City” below, or read it at The Brazen Head:
Here are some other sample poems from the collection that have been published online:
“Talking Saint Brendan Blues” (in Traces Journal)
Excerpt from “The Voyage of Saint Brendan” (in New Verse Review)
“The Archive of Readerless Books” (in Autumn Sky Poetry)
“Undigested Jonah” (in Traces Journal)
“The Butlerian Prohibition Against Thinking Machines” (in New Verse Review)
“Immersion” (in Forgotten Ground Regained)
“The Valley Between the Floods” (in The Chained Muse)
“The City of Letters” (in The Brazen Head)
“The Sunday Painters” (in Traces Journal)