Broken Hallelujah—New and Selected Poems

Jack Butler’s Broken Hallelujah: New and Selected Poems is a celebration that refuses to explain away pain and trouble, or to oversell the very transcendence it seeks. Its poems are always musical, whether formal, improvisational, or written according to the music of speech itself.

Butler understands poetry more nearly as the essence of that speech than as one of its products, the heart of the ways we know each other. Some of these forms are as old as English, but the voice stays immediate; and whether dark or hopeful, comic or sober, passionate or calm and knowing, these poems speak with the urgency of praise itself.

The son of a Southern Baptist minister, Jack Butler grew up in the Mississippi Delta (his home town is Alligator). He was awarded undergraduate degrees in mathematics and English, and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Arkansas. He has worked in the marketplace as well as in academia and administration. Broken Hallelujah: New and Selected Poems is his tenth book in eighteen worldwide editions, including a translation into Japanese. With its publication, his published books include three volumes of poetry, one of short fiction, a food book, and five novels, including two with Alfred A. Knopf. He has been nominated for the Pulitzer and the Pen/Faulkner, and has won awards for fiction and his poetry. His poetry, fiction, and reviews have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, Poetry Northwest, The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times Book Review, The Los Angeles Times Book Review, Black Warrior Review, New Orleans Review, Plains Poetry Review, and many other journals. He enjoys mathematics, physics, painting, zen, and yoga.