Butter

“Butter” by Elizabeth Alexander appears in the poet’s second book-length collection, Body of Life, published by Tia Chucha Press in 1996. It is a lyric poem composed in a single stanza of 25 lines in free verse, with no formal rhyme scheme or metrical pattern. The poem takes a first-person point of view, by which the speaker relates how much her mother loved butter. A litany, or list, of dishes the speaker ate while growing up indicates the presence of an abundance of butter in everything, melting and pooling on every plate. The end of the poem references The Story of Little Black Sambo, written by Helen Bannerman and published in 1899, in which a young boy relinquishes his new clothes to tigers who proceed to fight and chase each other so fast they spin themselves to butter. Butter, in addition to comfort food, is symbolic, as well, of luxury and privilege.

Poet Biography

Born in Harlem, New York, in 1962, Alexander moved to Washington, DC at the age of two. She earned her undergraduate degree from Yale before earning her master of arts at Boston University.