Sunday Evening at the Stardust Café

~~~~~Winner of the Iowa Source Poetry Book Prize ~~~~ I am taken with W.E. Butts's quiet lyricism and his ability to make the most everyday occurrences on one hand sparkle with the surprise of discovering a previously unknown universe, some previously untapped power, and at the same time be immediately useful to the soul and enriching and within reach of every reader's sensibilities. He can make you believe that the clouds and the weather and the sparrows were conspiring all along to buoy us intact to this moment, giving us the strength to confront the next precarious instance of time, history, memory, and existence. --------- Rustin Larson, Iowa Source Poetry Book Prize Judge, author of Crazy Star (Loess Hills Books, 2005)------- W.E. Butts makes a brilliant and deeply skilled debut in Sunday Evening at the Stardust Cafe. While he depicts the seemingly vacuous routines and scenes of small town life, we find we're witnessing the most poignant of places where the inside of the nothing that seems to be happening is equal to the weight of whatever we're capable of feeling. He's sculpted the voice of the average guy, but a guy who's super-sized the child of wonder inside him. What a relief and gift it is to discover that there are still avatars out there, walking unnoticed on the edge of their senses among us. Like they used to say when it meant what it said: 'marvelous' ----- Jack Myers, Texas Poet Laureate, 2003-'04 author of Routine Heaven (2005 Texas Review Poetry Prize)----- The poems of W.E. Butts are wryly observant, cleanly written, and above all elegaic -- haunted by the past in a way that scrupulously avoids sentimentality and the glib reckonings which characterize so much contemporary poetry. Quietly soulful, these are poems we can trust, both for their craft and for their maturity of vision. ----- David Wojahn author of Interrogation Palace: New and Selected Poems 1982-2004 (University of Pittsburgh Press)----- ~~~~~~ABOUT THE AUTHOR: W.E. Butts has published poems in The 1997 Anthology of of Magazine Verse & Yearbook of American Poetry (Monitor Books), Atlanta Review, Cimarron Review, Mid-American Review, and several other magazines and anthologies. The recipient of a Pushcart Prize nomination, he is also the author of a chapbook, Sunday Factory, from Finishing Line Press. Sunday Evening at the Stardust Cafe was chosen as a finalist for the 2005 Philip Levine Prize in Poetry from the University of California/Fresno.