This Is Not About Poems is a masterfully woven collection that gently challenges the boundaries of language and perception. With lyrical insight and metaphoric depth, it invites the reader into layered explorations of ecology, tenderness, time, and truth.

Titles that suggest the tangible—Salmon, Toolboxes, Purple, Cloaks—open like quiet doorways: deceptively simple, yet infinitely expansive. What begins as a reflection on wildflowers may become a meditation on grief and return. What seems to be about shadows may, in time, reveal the nature of freedom.

One of the most striking qualities of this collection is its metaphorical precision. Whether invoking a fig tree in a corporate glass sphere or the sound of a mute swan's wings lifting off a lake, Button draws readers into seeing freshly—not just the world, but themselves. Here, metaphor is not ornament—it is revelation. The effect is not unlike reading Anam Cara by John O’Donohue: a lyrical philosophy is at work.

Threaded throughout is a quiet invitation: to stay with ambiguity, to trust the sensory and the symbolic, to rest in what cannot be easily named. These poems do not explain; they evoke. They offer moments of pause, thresholds of attention, places where language listens rather than declares.

There is also a gentle politicality running through many poems—subtle acts of resistance against disconnection, commodification, and the silencing of what cannot be named. Yet Button never lectures; she evokes, nudges, reminds.

This Is Not About Poems is for seasoned poetry readers—and for those who didn’t know they needed poetry until now. Deceptively accessible, quietly expansive, wholly human. A book to return to—when words fall short, or when the world opens unexpectedly.