"Seldom Seen Road" is a collection of sharply observed and understated poems about the land and its people, specifically those who have made it grow. Bare bones, full of wit, insight, and fine imagery, they make up a book carefully constructed around a striking vision of the Prairies and its slowly disappearing history. Butler illuminates an oft-hidden world of strong women spanning two centuries, focusing the most powerful sequence of the book, "Lepidopterists," on them. These poems find their place in a tradition of prairie poetry that owes much to the work of such poets as John Newlove, Robert Kroetsch, and others. Combining an exacting attention to detail with organic sensibilities, "Seldom Seen Road" will grow on you.

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, and readers who crave a deft style charged with honest emotion should read Wells.

'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.

"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 internal friction of travelling in Svalbard during the fertile height of the Arctic summer. Blending travelogue and poetic meditation on place, Jenna Butler draws readers to the beauty and power of threatened landscapes, asking why some stories in recorded history are privileged while others speak only from beneath the surface.