Book Birthdays celebrate one year of a book’s life in social media posts, reviews, and more. This month we’re saying Happy First Book Birthday to Butterfly Nebula (Backwaters Press, 2023) by Laura Reece Hogan.
About the Book:
Winner of the Backwaters Prize in Poetry, Butterfly Nebula reaches from the depths of the sea to the edges of space to chart intersections of the physical universe, the divine, the human, and the constantly unfolding experience of being “one thing in the act of becoming another.” This collection of poems teems with creatures and cosmic phenomena that vivify and reveal our common struggle toward faith and identity.
A Word from the Author:
By the measure of nebulae, this first book birthday of Butterfly Nebula is a flicker in time. But by the yardstick of the butterfly, the praying mantis, the daffodil, and me, this year has been a reaching glory of sunrises, of flying across landscapes, of sharing words that take on new meaning through the sharing. Butterfly Nebula has stretched and soared this year in classrooms, auditoriums, universities, churches, art museums, bookstores, seminaries, skyscrapers, and planetariums.
Last October Butterfly Nebula had a celestial countdown at the UCLA Planetarium in conversation with astronomer Claire Williams. It was thrilling to read poems in the planetarium alongside Claire, who talked about the physics of the cosmic objects in the poems and located them in the night sky of the planetarium dome. Next, we had a stellar launch at Chevalier’s Bookstore in Hollywood with poet friends Donna Spruijt-Metz, Vandana Khanna, and Chloe Martinez. Readings in Culver City at the Village Well and online for the Inflectionist Reading Series followed, with a signing in Calabasas at Little Blue. Next was a rainy trip to Baltimore to read at the fabulous Bird in Hand Café and Bookstore (they handed me a cup of hot chocolate on arrival—need I say more?) for Smartish Pace.
The sea poems in Butterfly Nebula surfaced for a reading in the Surfboard Room of Payson Library at Pepperdine University, overlooking the Pacific. What a joy to read “Heart as Siphonophore” in that location with such a wonderful student audience! Pepperdine professor Kate Bolton Bonnici and I embarked next on our “Alabama book tour”—we read at bookstores in Mobile, Foley, and Tuscaloosa, as well as at Randolph School in Huntsville and Auburn University. Then came Houston, with an event in conversation with astronomer Dr. Megan Reiter at Rice University. Megan works with the Webb telescope, and she brought images of some of the cosmic objects in the poems to share with the audience. This was one of my favorite events in celebration of the book—it took place just before the total eclipse, and we had a huge audience of Rice students, alumni, faculty, and local neighbors.
Michigan came next, with readings at a Christian Century event in Grand Rapids and for the Lansing Poetry Club in a church in Lansing. Then I traveled with my daughter to New York City for a reading at the America Magazine offices with poet Philip Metres. This was another one of my favorite readings—we had a full, lovely audience and a vibrant conversation—and one of my beloved friends had flown in to surprise me at the reading! Another major highlight for me was visiting Brigham Young University as the fall Faith & Imagination Lecturer and reading in the BYU English Reading Series. Finally, Butterfly Nebula and I rounded out the year with a visit to Notre Dame University, where I read with brilliant poet and dear friend Shann Ray.
I’m so grateful to the Backwaters Press and the University of Nebraska Press, which continue to give such generous, thoughtful support to Butterfly Nebula, and helped to make this first whirlwind year of readings and events a success. What a joyous first year—and there is more celebration to come, including a performance next March of New York composer Shanan Estreicher’s choral setting of poems from Butterfly Nebula to be performed by Cerddorion Vocal Ensemble at St. Ignatius of Antioch Episcopal Church in New York City. Happy birthday, Butterfly Nebula—and wishing you many fruitful, shining years to come.
Awards:
Gold Medal in Poetry for the 2024 Illumination Book Awards
2024 Catholic Media Association Book Award Honorable Mention in Poetry
Reviews:
“Butterfly Nebula is an incredible journey of self-discovery and connection with the many facets of the divine, many of which share this planet with us.”—Esteban Rodriguez and Leonora Simonovis, EcoTheo Collective
“Hogan’s speakers engage with the natural world and the ‘Beloved’ with equal, fierce intensity in a personal, searching voice that demands engagement and attention. An urgency to connect and to understand pervades the book and is catching.”—Jennifer Horne, Writers Forum
“Above all else, what keeps me—a faithless atheist—coming back to these poems and treasuring them is their deeply inventive language and form, their diction, sound, image, and multisensory saturation.”—Virginia Bell, RHINO
“[These] poems often reflect cosmic tableaux, yet some of the most beautiful small human vignettes are mixed within, the soccer game, a funeral . . . if only other poets could learn to handle the significance of human emotion in their poems just this way.”—Al Rocheleau, Of Poets and Poetry
“Butterfly Nebula considers a plethora of creatures and natural phenomena that animate an interest in the preservation of the natural world, faith, and identity.”—Maya Popa, Publishers Weekly
UNP blog 