Let Me Lay One On You by Dan Butler

Dan Butler is known primarily as an actor, having played major roles On and Off Broadway, on tv, and in film, as well as writing, directing, and producing in all of those mediums. Dan’s poetry has been seen in ONE ART; a journal of poetry as well as the anthology The Path to Kindness, Poems of Connection and Joy. Let Me Lay One On You marks Dan’s debut poetry collection.

 

PRAISE:

 

In the poems of Let Me Lay One on You, Dan Butler brings not exactly “emotion recollected in tranquility” but emotions collected on knives’ edges, a cutlery of tension and compression.  Still, yes, but still those miraculous kinetic mechanisms of balancing balanced stillness.  He is a grand funambulist, paused on a tightwire, or a fine-tuning rigger rigging a suspenseful suspension bridge.  These poems are heart-stopping and synapse-shocking. I held my breath through the glide-paths of narration, the dead-stick landings, the controlled crashes, waiting, wanting, feeling each ecstatic weightlessness.

–Michael Martone is the author of Table Talk & Second Thoughts and Plain Air: Sketches from Winesburg, Indiana

 

In graceful poems crafted with humor and heart, Dan Butler transmutes memory into a form of healing. Let Me Lay One On You is a marvelous debut, full of surprises and stories, moving deftly from the “jabber and squeeze” of a teenage beach to the “fluty, minor key” of a hermit thrush singing deep in the woods. This collection holds space for sorrow while channeling joy, whether stomping through a New York City downpour or gazing into a ceramic pickling crock. Butler tells his father’s jokes and his grandparents’ stories, communes with animals and maple trees, and reckons with hard personal and cultural history, embracing what’s flawed, funny, and deeply human. Let Me Lay One On You finds wonder in ordinary life, forgiving self and others in the process, beckoning us all to a place where “a gentler world begins.”

–Diana Whitney, author of Girl Trouble

 

Dan Butler’s stunning collection of poems, Let Me Lay One On You, will delight you with fresh new ways of seeing. The reader is transported to Papaw’s kitchen, to Nanna’s playful presence, her funny dentures, to an often challenging father, to a park bench in San Francisco, a joyous afternoon of memorable kisses: “I’ve never kissed / a man like this, outside, among other / people.” Throughout the collection, we feel the struggle of the poet as he moves through his life toward self-acceptance, as he comes to understand where he has come from, what parts of his parents he finds in himself. Lots to admire in this brave and joyful book, bursting with life, with a happy, unexpected twist toward the end. After reading Let Me Lay One On You, I will always now desire a “changer,” like the paper boy’s, to help me remember “love is the currency, always at the ready.”

–Laura Foley, author of Sledding the Valley of the Shadow