From the first moment I read a Jack Butler poem I was hooked. Even more, I was awed—by the verbal brilliance, the sense of serious play, the depth of emotion and subject matter, the existential embrace of all his poems. All of these qualities are on full display in these collected poems. While we share Southern roots, and Butler’s poems do reflect those roots, he transcends them, his work is universal in the deepest sense. So, Dear Reader, one could do worse, a lot worse, than be a reader of Jack Butler’s luminous work. I certainly have been and will be. Please join me.
— George Drew
ONBOOKS | OPINION: The hard grace of Jack Butler
October 11, 2025 | by Philip Martin | Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
His novels demand stamina, his poems flicker like lightning, and his South is a place of ghosts and contradictions.
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So “Firefish” becomes more than a “greatest hits” collection. It is the record of a life’s devotion to the music of language, a reminder that beneath the novels — their difficulty, their satire, their sprawling cadences — there has always been a poet’s ear. Where the novels are symphonies, the poems are lightning strikes: brief illuminations of absurdity, grief, wonder. They reveal the intimacy beneath the difficulty, the man behind the masks.
Please read the whole of Philip Martin’s The hard grace of Jack Butler here: https://edition.arkansasonline.com/article/283794269992254
As both poet and novelist, Butler is a most audacious and brilliant writer.
— Alec Clayton
For anyone interested in a clear-eyed assessment of the evolution of the contemporary South, I recommend the poems of Jack Butler. Elsewhere, he has written, “A southern author now must provide not only character but also the context in which that character is credible. The shopping malls, the trailer houses, the corporate offices, the frozen yogurt shops, the video racks in the country groceries. Before a writer was measured by the fidelity of his rendering. Now she is measured by her ability to accumulate real-world details.” This statement is seminal to any consideration of Butler’s poems. Also, for anyone interested in the potentialities of poetry’s music, a mastery of technique, and good storytelling, this is one-stop shopping.
— Samuel Prestridge, author of A Dog’s Job of Work
Jack Butler always chooses correctly to show us a world we haven’t looked at yet. . . . to read him is to find out that there are no limits to the boundaries of the human imagination. Don’t just read him. Climb on his back and fly with him.
— Larry Brown
It’s about time!