Reviews for the work of Anthony Butts
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“We must have faith in what’s not given,” writes Anthony Butts in Little Low Heaven, his extraordinary new volume of poetry. Seldom is a second book by a young poet so philosophically ambitious, and yet so vulnerable in its intimacy. Beginning with a journey through the streets of Detroit, where “The act of wanting offers / only the hope of movement,” and ending with an apocalyptic vision in which survivors lower a gangplank onto “a new continent / that will come to own us no more / nor haunt us any less,”

" . . . by the end of the collection [Little Low Heaven] we see the speaker of these poems emerge from his spiritual desolation and walk in the direction of light, but first the reader must travel with him through the shadow-world of dark deeds. The precise nature of those deeds remains obscure, is hinted at rather than explicated, but a number of the poems explore the rim terrain of childhood sexual abuse, abandonment by the speaker's parents, and the inevitable loneliness, isolation and alienation that result from such terrible events. These are haunted, and haunting, their cumulative effect is not to sadden the reader but, instead, to astonish us with their testament to the human capacity for endurance, and great gift of language, and the healing power of art."

—Angela O'Donnell, from "Words Made Flesh: Poetry and the Eucharistic Feast" from Christianity and Literature, Vol. 56, No. 1 (Fall 2006)

Praise for Fifth Season:

“Fifth Season is, I think, both proof and exemplar of Chekhov’s claim that art exists to prepare the soul for tenderness. For perhaps the greatest accomplishment of this book is the way it manages to preserve, however brutal its subject matter, a raw susceptibility to the most mute and ineffable moment of wonder . . . This is a book whose demons and angels are equally acknowledged, equally real, and equally allotted their place in the poems. That any first book can manage such a feat is, in itself, remarkable; that Anthony Butts has done it in a style and a music all his own is a triumph not only of his art, but of his own indomitable spirit as well. In another time, we might have called this ‘grace.’

—Sherod Santos

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