Continuing City by Jesse Keith Butler

The last upholder of former rights of access to the common thoroughfare

Artist unknown, University of Applied Sciences, Augsburg, Germany.

This week we signed superstar poet Jesse Keith Butler to a one-book deal for Continuing City & Other Poems. We are so excited about this book, which represents a significant development from Butler’s fine first book, The Living Law (2024). The title poem won the ESU Formal Verse Contest 2024. Final judge, Australia’s leading formalist Stephen Edgar, said of the poem:

What struck and impressed me about this poem was the way the form to some extent enacts the content. The formal regularity of the iambic pentameter and the strict rhyme scheme—both handled with skill—are shaken and pulled apart by enjambment and sentences which lie at odds with that rigid grid, mirroring the disruptions to the city’s stable forms by demolition and construction. Repetition of key words creates a sense of urgency, or even panic, and, literally rising above the damaged cityscape, the poem builds to a dystopian vision of the future.

Jesse is widely published in his native Canada and across the English-speaking world. He writes in both received and invented forms. His work is wry, often humorous, self-deprecating, and deeply concerned with the spiritual realities of this world that go so often unnoticed. His poem “Talking Saint Brendan Blues” exemplifies the work contained in Continuing City, with its strong narrative drive, attention to detail and formal dexterity.

Talking Saint Brendan Blues

Continuing City also contains to our knowledge the first modern verse translation of the Middle English version of The Voyage of Saint Brendan from the 14th century South English Legendary. It’s of course debatable that translations from Middle English are necessary, so perhaps we could call it an adaptation. Regardless, Jesse renders the legendary story of Saint Brendan’s voyage in rhyming couplets, remaining true to the devotional nature of the original in thoroughly contemporary language. The Voyage of Saint Brendan is one of the first Western European maritime adventure stories and is as wonderfully strange in its own way as the Odyssey or the Mabinogion.

We are truly honoured to publish Jesse’s work and look forward to bringing you what is certain to be a major milestone in the current formalist revival.

God willing, Continuing City will be released on Saint Brendan’s Day, May 16th, 2027.

Jesse can be found at his website here.

Many, many more details to come.