Reviews of Fifth Season
__________________________________________________________________

“ Fifth Season is, I think, both proof and exemplar of Chekhov’s claim that art exists to prepare the soul for tenderness. For perhaps the greatest accomplishment of this book is the way it manages to preserve, however brutal its subject matter, a raw susceptibility to the most mute and ineffable moments of wonder: the dazed Japanese girls at a late-night diner ‘shaking the slight chill / of Detroit autumn from their hair;' an orphaned child forming ‘a reservoir in the sand, / Lake Michigan stilled at the border;' the Braille kids from the elementary school who ‘drift out into the fields / to take the swings before noon, / and only physics / keeps them from flying’. . . This is a book whose demons and angels are equally acknowledged, equally real, and equally allotted their place in the poems. That any first book can manage such a feat is, in itself, remarkable; that Anthony Butts has done it in a style and a music all his own is a triumph not only of his art, but of his own indomitable spirit as well. In another time, we might have called this ‘grace.’”

—from the foreword by Sharod Santos.