Sky Tongued Back with Light
In Sébastien Luc Butler’s elegant chapbook Sky Tongued Back with Light, art and nature symbolize conflicted feelings about queerness, religion, and grief.
The line “from answer to question, question / to answer” encapsulates the book’s internal vacillations. Christian imagery reflects a futile search for comfort; a church is bypassed because “To enter would be to enter into my / own loneliness.” Identity is a conundrum in “Outdoorsman,” which considers a father, the self, and a lover in turn. Remembered homophobia complicates the speaker’s relationship with the body, and solitude vies with their hunger for connection; repeated “bear” and “bare” wordplay is used to contrast feelings of vigor with vulnerability.
Death is inescapable, not least in the four poems headed “Shroud.” Nature sometimes proffers wonders—the orange trio of a peach orchard, a stray cat, and pumpkins; the spectacle of a mass cicada hatching—but also bloody realities. In “Anatomy Lesson,” a Cooper’s hawk devours a squirrel, exposing “some / dark red truth.” A neighbor’s sudden death and a father’s hospitalization reinforce the sense of life’s precariousness.
From the first poem to the last, the alliterative free verses in the chapbook Sky Tongued Back with Light depict the complete trajectory of a day—or a life—with realism and panache.
Reviewed by
Rebecca Foster
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. No fee was paid by the publisher for this review. Foreword Reviews only recommends books that we love. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
