PRAISE FOR LIFE HISTORY

The poems in Life History are a delight, a pleasure, a litany of sorrows. “I carry my grief in take-out boxes,” writes Butler. And indeed, he does—in poems that explore isolation and loneliness as well as the deep, abiding joys of companionship. “Love of my life,” the speaker’s beloved addresses him. “Fear of my fear,” he answers. Here, angst is parceled into clever and compelling lines the serve to measure the weight and worth of experience. “We are all gold,” he tells us, “precious, dirty metal / passed through a generation of hands.”

— Danusha Laméris, author of Bonfire Opera and The Moons of August, current Poet Laureate of Santa Cruz County

"I wanted to make them think I'd quit but I won't quit," writes William Ward Butler in Life History, a chapbook full of poems that are so specifically themselves, they're interested in the world even when it isn't interesting or interested in them. No, these poems are never boring! Though the world often is. And they aren't faking anything either! Though there sure seems to be a lot of that these days. There are echoes of Frank O'Hara here, but Frank O'Hara in California, and Frank O'Hara at the Bigfoot Discovery Museum, too. Do yourself a favor and read one of these poems, and then another. They are happening exactly in this moment. Right now.

— Alex Dimitrov, author of Together and by Ourselves and Begging for It

William Ward Butler's Life History is a resolution to survival, to finding the small joys that give meaning to the ordinariness of being. There is a slant and hard-wrought hopefulness in these poems, earned not through an easy avoidance of the darkness but a direct acknowledgment of it. An acute observer, he is a poet attuned to the inexplicable nature of love, what can and can’t be said out loud. His poems seek out God in the back of the fridge, on the dance floor, and in the small, everyday miracles that save our lives again and again: “That’s not a metaphor,” he writes, “it’s just amazing, is all.”

— Jacques J. Rancourt