The Chalk Butterfly

Responding to the fragile borders between climate change and mental health to evolve into conversations around trauma, change, care and the natural world, The Chalk Butterfly explores images of home and the paradoxes around our simultaneous care and un-care for nature and language. Working backwards through the butterfly's life cycle, each phase examines the tipping points, vanishing or fractured boundaries between our environments and reflects on the damaging ways we step on both the earth and humanity. Yet in these precise, exquisitely realised prose poems there is also celebration of the overwhelming urge to adapt and help life thrive, a turning away from the despair that would accept we might 'just about manage' or even fail in favour of moments of transformation.

The Chalk Butterfly carries us on poignant winds through disruptions of the external as internal, and vice versa-how what lies within us is the key to saving creatures whose lives we're enmeshed with, and how we might instead imagine 'what we could be inside the colours of open hands'.

- Khairani Barokka

Each of Jane Monson's quietly immersive prose-poems is a light cast on the different facet of a vulnerable, interdependent world. Inanimate things are as charged with sensation and volition as the human minds and bodies that respond, sometimes painfully, to their disorder. This writing leaves us with no choice but to see more clearly; it enables us to care a little more.

- Philip Gross

Reading Jane Monson's The Chalk Butterfly is like entering a strange and beautiful world where language takes on alchemical properties and butterflies tattoo human skin with their pollen. These poems are full of walls, but rather than barriers, the walls act as invitations to leverage the ingenuity of Monson's imagination and the narrative possibilities of the prose poem to transcend them. I found myself enthralled.

- Donna Stonecipher

These extraordinarily vivid prose poems take us deep inside the tangle of our relationships and our disturbed yet resilient interior lives, while tracing their narrative out into the failed politics of our time and back again. In writing that is sometimes reminiscent of Anna Kavan, The Chalk Butterfly sweeps us irresistibly into those situations and states of mind in which we so often find ourselves damaged and nightmarishly trapped, yet this collection also startles us throughout into realising moments of hope, tenderness and light.

- Ian Seed

Jane Monson is a witness poet, looking and having to look, painstakingly counterpointing our wilful blindness. ... these poems are a narrative of little exposures only revealing the distance they've taken you once the whole is realised. They may be about the climate breakdown, but they are invested in the human despite our damaging, destructive ways.

- Alice Willitts