Description
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 most fully exemplified in the translation of The Voyage of Saint Brendan, which sees its first complete publication in this book. There has been a great deal of interest in this translation (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.
“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 Forgotten Work
“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
“In many ways this book is two books for the price of one because it includes a masterful translation of the long poem ‘The Voyage of Saint Brendan,” an underappreciated Middle English classic. With craft and vision Butler has given readers poetry they will often want to revisit.” — A.M. Juster, translator of Petrarch’s Canzoniere
“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 Saint Brendan in a version sure to delight modern readers and medievalists alike.” —Shawn Phillip Cooper, Ph.D., FRSA, Editor-in-Chief, Critical Readings
“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
“Poems in Continuing City are metered and woven in end rhyme that places the reader in an office, by a beach, on a bus moving forward, through an ever-changing city and landscape with a destination that seems skewed and unreachable. Water rises and midlife passes. Whales orbit, and the bus rider’s blurred reflection is barely glimpsed through layers of glare and debris. Jesse Keith Butler writes poems of elegy, love and language; meter and astonishment.” —Yvonne Blomer, author of Death of Persephone: A Murder and The Last Show on Earth
Praise for Jesse Keith Butler’s first book The Living Law:
“With this debut collection, Jesse Butler is joining the growing group of Canadian poets who are taking poetry away from the academy and returning it to a broader audience of poetry lovers. Butler’s poems are thoughtful, well-crafted, and a pleasure to read.” — A.M. Juster, author of Wonder & Wrath
“This is a very fine book. Jesse Butler has put his mastery of traditional poetic form to good use in these varied reflections on faith, personal tragedy, encounters with nature, life in the modern Canadian suburbs and many other things. These poems reveal a mind expansively curious about the world and deeply attentive to it.” — Burl Horniachek, editor of To Heaven’s Rim: The Kingdom Poets Book of World Christian Poetry
“It’s not so often that a debut collection of poetry reveals a care for poetic forms, a clarity in book structure, and a serious grappling with large ideas. Jesse Keith Butler’s ambitious The Living Law reaches for the large: a world that lacks its Blake to etch fire in the mind; makeshift shelters in a modern landscape stripped of spirit and transcendence; the pulse of life below the world’s veneer; the living law as gateway onto a wide, windswept expanse. (And don’t miss the hermit’s donkeys!)” — Marly Youmans, author of Seren of the Wildwood
“These finely crafted poems cover road trips across Canada, a night of whiskey drinking with a buddy in an old church belltower, the joys and agonies of parenthood, and the inner lives of the Biblical patriarchs. Throughout, Butler renders relatable human experiences while displaying a strong grasp of the capacities and opportunities to be found within the limits of traditional English metre and rhyme.” — Steven Searcy in Traces: A Canadian Journal of Christian Arts & Letters
About the Author: Jesse Keith Butler is an award-winning poet based in Ottawa, Ontario. His work bridges traditional and contemporary poetic forms, rooted in his experience of the life of faith. His first book, The Living Law, was published in 2024 by Darkly Bright Press. He is the winner the inaugural ESU Formal Verse Contest, judged by Stephen Edgar. In March and April of 2026, Butler was the Writer in Residence at Berton House in Dawson City, Yukon.
Publication date: May 16, 2027 (Saint Brendan’s Day)
ISBN: 978-1-7642190-5-1
Cover painting: “Saint Brendan and Jasconius” by Michael Galovic (michaelgalovic.com)
Ships: May 16, 2027 (Saint Brendan’s Day)
