After five years of working with bees on her farm in northern Alberta, Jenna Butler shares with the reader the rich experience of keeping hives. Starting with a rare bright day in late November as the bees are settling in for winter she takes us through a year in beekeeping on her small piece of the boreal forest. Weaving together her personal story with the practical aspects of running a farm she takes us into the worlds of honeybees and wild bees. She considers the twinned development of the canola and honey industries in Alberta and the impact of crop sprays, debates the impact of introduced flowers versus native flowers, the effect of colony collapse disorde ..

Windburned, eyes closed, this: beneath the keening of bergs, a deeper thresh of glaciers calving, creaking with sun. Sound of earth, her bones, wide russet bowl of hips splaying open. From these sere flanks, her desiccating body, what a sea change is born. From the endangered Canadian boreal forest to the environmentally threatened Svalbard archipelago off the coast of Norway, Jenna Butler takes us on a sea voyage that connects continents and traces the impacts of climate change on northern lands. With a conservationist, female gaze, she questions explorer narratives and the mythic draw of the polar North. As a woman who cannot have children, she writes out the ..

Jenna Butler draws on her own experiences of her grandmother's disappearance into senile dementia to reassemble a sensual world in longpoem form that positively crackles with imagery and rhythm. Identities and memories flow and flicker as she strings together fragments of narrative into stories that comprise one woman's life. It entwines her disappearing life with that of the persona of the woman's granddaughter through a choreographed confusion of identities: of she's and I's. Few poets could execute this with convincing solemnity, while simultaneously recovering the dignity of the sufferer and her loved ones. Butler does. Poetry lovers, critics and scholars, a ..

Aphelion is about distances, simultaneously belonging to two countries but being rooted in neither. In her first collection, poet Jenna Butler fluently explores this rift, sounding out the meaning of home from the perspective of a British-born Canadian. Written in experimental free verse and containing a selection of anti ghazals, Aphelion's subject matter, physical appearance on the page, and the way it is read aloud all reflect these elemental distances. ..

Finalist: br High Plain Book Award, Creative Nonfiction "This is not the story of a ready-made farm, complete with generations of history, carefully tended tools and sturdy clapboard farmhouse." In 2006 Jenna Butler and her partner, Thomas, purchased "160 acres more or less" of rough northern bush. They knew they weren't purchasing anything more than hard work and hope but still they headed up every weekend to clear a spot in those woods where they could plant their first crops. In this collection Butler talks of the hardships, humor and grace notes of trying to build a northern farm. From being driven out by mosquitoes to thwarting grasshoppers to sublime m ..