NYT Introduces Alex Butler: 'A Poet Who Works in 3-D'

Check out NYT's profile of literary newcomer, Alex Butler. Butler recently read from her Circling the Same, her newly published 80-page poem, at Creature of Comfort, a Manhattan lifestyle boutique.

The writer Alex Butler may live in brownstone Brooklyn, but that’s about the extent of her similarities to the young literary set. A licensed social worker, she has also worked for the designer Jane Mayle, served as a production assistant on the set of “Sex and the City” and recorded a series of humorous performance videos. It was the loss, in quick succession, of both her parents — and Butler’s experience as her mother’s caretaker during a harrowing illness — that spurred her to turn what had been a secret hobby into a career. But rather than sit down at a laptop and type about the experience, she began speaking words and dialogue into a Dictaphone — and later her computer’s camera — which led to not one, but two books: her debut memoir, “Walking the Night Road,” due out next year from Columbia University Press, and “Circling the Same,” an 80-poem meditation on loss. The latter — newly available online through its publisher, the Los Angeles–based gallery and art-book press Ohwow — is as much art object as literature: Butler’s words are printed alongside photographs from the artists Mirabelle Marden and Andrea Longacre-White. “Both of these artists’ work, and what I imagined were their intentions, reminded me of a world altered by grief,” she explains.

Learn more at NYT.