Chalk Butterfly

Jane Monson lives in Cambridge as a poet, independent researcher and Specialist Mentor for disabled students at the University of Cambridge. Previously she was an Associate Lecturer in Creative Writing at Anglia Ruskin University. Her PhD is on the prose poetry of Francis Ponge and she has an MA in Creative Writing (poetry) from UEA. She edited This Line is not for Turning (2011), the anthology of contemporary British prose poetry which Pascale Petit praised as ‘ground-breaking’, and has more recently edited British Prose Poetry: The Poems without Lines (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). She is widely anthologised in the UK and her prose poetry and reviews have been featured UK-wide and internationally in Westerly, Fortnightly Review, Envoi, Aesthetica, Magma and Poetry London. Jane’s first collection with Cinnamon was Speaking Without Tongues (2010). Cassandra Atherton, award-winning Australian prose poet and international expert and critic of the form has referred to Jane as ‘the fairy godmother of prose poetry.’

Jane Monson is a dedicated, gifted practitioner of the prose poem as impressively cinematic montage. 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, 'whose lessening measures our story and the ways we refuse to live'; 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; 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. Images, characters, fragments of stories, recur so that the whole reads together as a kind of gripping thriller. 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. Situations which may seem at first to have no connection prove to be intimately and vitally related. It is only by recognition and reconciliation of these connections that we may be able to 'defy boundaries and survive'. - Ian Seed; Jane Monson is a witness poet, looking and having to look, painstakingly counterpointing our wilful blindness. The collection itself keeps pace with chronology, structured around the stages of the lifecycle of the butterfly - only here the predictable sequence we thought we knew is told backwards and eclipsed by new irregularities and uncertainties. In its preoccupation with blindness, windows, touch and breakdown, I'm reminded of Tacita Dean's landscape film of Antigone in the wilderness, leading the blind and bandaged Oedipus between two stories. Likewise, these poems are a narrative of little exposures only revealing the distance they've taken you once the whole is realised. These poems may be about the climate breakdown, but they are invested in the human despite our damaging, destructive ways. - Alice Willitts; 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