Magnetic North
“The ecologically-centered nonfiction vignettes are lyric, descriptive and brimming with carefully curated sensory detail. This is an instantly likable, highly intelligent, and empathetic narrator, one that we can trust from beginning to end.
Winner of AUPresses Book, Jacket, & Journal Show — Poetry and Literature, 2019
Among shortlisted titles for Banff Mountain Book Competition; Mountain & Wilderness Literature – Fiction &Poetry, 2019
Among shortlisted titles for INDIE Book of the Year Awards (Travel) | Foreword Reviews, 2019
"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.
Praise