Magnetic North

Sea Voyage to Svalbard

Jenna Butler

• Publisher: University of Alberta Press
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN:
  9781772124217
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: North American Literary Collections

"Windburned, eyes closed, this: beneath the keening of bergs, a deeper thresh of glaciers calving, creaking with sun. Sound of earth, her bones, wide russet bowl of hips splaying open. From these sere flanks, her desiccating body, what a sea change is born." From the endangered Canadian boreal forest to the environmentally threatened Svalbard archipelago off the coast of Norway, Jenna Butler takes us on a sea voyage that connects continents and traces the impacts of climate change on northern lands. With a conservationist, female gaze, she questions explorer narratives and the mythic draw of the polar North. As a woman who cannot have children, she writes out the internal friction of travelling in Svalbard during the fertile height of the Arctic summer. Blending travelogue and poetic meditation on place, Jenna Butler draws readers to the beauty and power of threatened landscapes, asking why some stories in recorded history are privileged while others speak only from beneath the surface.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• The Journey
• Lines Toward Ice
• Pyramiden
• Ornithomancy
• Night
• Bone
• The Men at the Edge of the World
• She Becomes the Ocean
• Arctic by Air
• Afloat
• Barentsburg
• Cusp
• Postcard from Svalbard
• At the Face
• Threads
• Leaving Days
• Song to the Boreal
• Notes
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• Other Titles from the University of Alberta Press