Butcher

by Natasha T. Miller

Book Overview

Butcher is a book about love & loss -- about being unapologetic and transparent in grief.

Natasha finds an unexpected solace in the kitchen after losing her best friend and brother, Marcus. Here, using the cuts of the cow as a metaphor Miller, explores addiction, family & tragedy.

Butcher takes the body of a cow and cleaves it into 5 parts: envisioning the cuts as relationship with family members and social forces. Her...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1943735905
• ISBN13: 9781943735907
• Release Date: February 2021
• Publisher: Button Poetry
• Length: 88 Pages
• Weight: 0.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 5.5" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

Striking, but in need one one more editing round

"When she asks me to get her more drink, / I will carry it to her proudly" (Sangria, 4) I found this collection from a list of books by queer poets and bought it knowing nothing else. I now know that Natasha is mostly a spoken word poet and while she has a few stand-out written poems in this collection, I could tell. A great many of these poems just seem to lack presence on the page, but when I imagine them read they come alive. Because Natasha clearly writes to create an audible impact, I found myself actively hating the way she uses poetic conventions in this book when they often don't even occur to me when reading classically trained poets. I was hyper-aware of line/stanza breaks, capitalization, and punctuation in a way I genuinely never have been reading poetry before. I am fairly certain this hyperawareness is because many of the choices made in the collection feel like mistakes. I don't know if these only feel like mistakes because I almost exclusively read not listen to written poetry so the choices just don't resonate with me, or if the poems required more editing. Those complaints aside there are several striking poems in the collection that I found truly ingenious. The collection tackles blackness, queerness, and grief in inventive ways that add a unique voice to the poetic world. "I will let her die / believing that everything // skips a generation, even death." (Sangria, 5) My actual biggest complaint about the book is that everything but the author's bio completely ignores Natasha's expertise as a spoken word poet. Spoken word is her expertise and this book would have greatly benefited from acknowledging that. What I wouldn't give for even one QR code link to Natasha performing in this. I think the collection could be something truly revolutionary if it linked these poems to spoken word performances of the same poem, the compare and contrast would be stunning. Even if there aren't spoken word versions of the poems in the collection a link to any of her work would do so much to elevate the collection. Obviously, I can go look her up on my own, but I would have loved to see that incorporated into this collection. "Old Black or New Black, you’re still Black. Outside gay or bedroom gay, you’re still gay. You’re still target, still one police stop or ‘I’m sorry I have a woman’ away from your mother burying you on this same land you tried to protect. Don’t make them have to remind you. You’re still one of us." (An Open Letter to Raven Symoné, 18-19) The two absolutely knock-out poems of the collection are "The Other Black Man" and "Ten Things You Sound Like When You Say 'all lives matter' in Response to Black Lives Matter". They are both incredibly strong poems that are not only striking on the page but also can be easily imagined as spoken word. The form of "The Other Black Man" is the strongest of the whole collection. The poem fills the page despite taking up relatively little physical space. The words leap out at you and the message is enhanced by the ways the words flow along the pages. The poem "Ten Things You Sound Like When You Say 'all lives matter' in Response to Black Lives Matter" has one of the cleanest messages I've ever seen. Natasha tells you exactly what the poem is going to be, then knocks it out of the park. The poem is concise, powerful, and drives its message home in a fully admirable way. "Ten Things You Sound Like When You Say 'all lives matter' in Response to Black Lives Matter" is a poem I can easily see being posted with no context as a clap back to internet trolls and is something that any white person with a racist uncle can send that uncle to immediately start a fight (I will in fact be sending it to my racist uncle). "Bring a fruitcake to every Christmas party / that you’re not really welcomed at." (How to Come Out and Stay Out, 20) Other stand-out poems in the collection are; "How to Come Out and Stay Out", "To Existing Being Enough", "Frank Ocean", "Grief", "They Say", and "Hot