Phantom Hue

"Phantom Hue would like a word with what has occurred. In its varied vision, the past and present gather their present-perfect questions. And then they are posed---toward transmutation. Butler remembers as re-cognition, as reorientation. Phantom Hue's deft poems consider the weight of learning and knowing our histories simultaneously. We can courageously begin with our ‘gold-spun blood,’ but we must also reckon ‘after the ashes settle on our campus rooftops.’ And Butler will ask bravely, beautifully: ‘what can I build from the sown?’"
 

-- Renia White, author of Casual Conversation

“'There must be a victim for every victor,' Butler writes. But who can we blame? And how do heritage and the body survive the awful weight of trauma and injustice? Phantom Hue is a powerful tribute to the body and its shimmering survival through the persistence of trauma, the suffering of women, and the insidious evils of racism. With dimension and searing insight, Butler moves between past and present, a ghostly and lyrical witness to sexual assault on a great-great-grandmother, microaggressions at a library reading, a mother’s haunting photograph, and a painful dream. These poems ask what ‘the origin / of disconnection’ is, and how we can offer care and reverence to the past when it is studded with pain.”
 

-- Arah Ko, author of Brine Orchid

“Phantom Hue, Schyler Butler’s poignant debut collection, gives the reader a visceral view of how America’s legacies of racism, gendered bigotry, and stark socioeconomic divides continue to haunt and strike. This book makes exquisite, unflinching portraits of the soul and the body processing strife’s ramifications, and of the willful heart making its way toward new shades of reckoning. Butler’s poetic voice is honest, potent, surprising, and promises to keep swiftly dazzling for years and years to come.”

-- Marcus Jackson, author of Love’s Austere and Lonely Off