This long-awaited first collection of poems by Jacob Butlett is a fine arrival of a distinct new voice. Butlett's verse combines astonishing lyricism with deft storytelling. Stars Burning Night's Quiet Rhapsody is a book by a poet who is graceful in examining the fragments of self and family left behind by tragedy. It's a book of fertile imagination, voracious solitude, and most importantly, abundant hope among the dark themes of loss this book examines. Butlett is a poet who doesn't take the easy route of placid sentiment-he goes right to the heart of matters. Stars Burning Night's Quiet Rhapsody leaves readers in awe of Butlett's revelations yet admiring this poet's journey to these potent, hard-won wisdoms.
-Allison Joseph, author of LEXICON and Confessions of a Barefaced Woman
In Stars Burning Night's Quiet Rhapsody, broken-down cars and derecho-battered towns spell out the speaker's reckoning with complicated familial histories and internalized shame. Even in the book's most elegiac moments, Butlett returns inevitably to the musicality of Iowan grasses and the musculature of cumulonimbus. I am taken with the breadth of lyricism in these rich and harrowing poems. Butlett's poems grapple beautifully with the question of how to live and love in a world where death hangs over everything like a second sky.
-Andrew Hemmert, author of Blessing the Exoskeleton and Sawgrass Sky
As its title suggests, Jacob Butlett's Stars Burning Night's Quiet Rhapsody is a study in lush, thoughtful imagery that renders Dubuque, Iowa, as both gorgeous and threatening. Equal parts love letter and memento mori, this book is a beautiful meditation on queerness, grief, and the difficult road to self-knowledge. Refreshing in their honesty, these poems offer us their raw, queer heart, lifting it up and inviting us in.
-Emily Rose Cole, author of Thunderhead
