Phantom Hue

Coming November 3rd, 2026 - Books will ship the final week of October
Preorder now!

This stunning debut asks what remains of intimacy when the quiet terror of White supremacy shapes every touch, silence, and room. Through a fiercely confessional voice, Phantom Hue traces the inner life of a light-skinned Black woman reckoning with the inheritances of race, gender, history, and family. From colorism to the uneasy desire of interracial love, each poem strips away performance to expose raw truth. Rooted in the personal yet bound to the political, Butler’s lyricism and intellect pulse through a collection that grieves and praises, confesses and conjures—a luminous reckoning with what it means to live, and love, inside a haunted body.

Schyler Butler was born in Columbus, Ohio but raised in Central Texas. A graduate of The Ohio State University’s MFA Program in Creative Writing, she has received support from the Ohio Arts Council and the Greater Columbus Arts Council. Her work appears in Obsidian, African American Review, Transition, swamp pink, and elsewhere. Phantom Hue is her debut collection.

from Yearn

Here I sit with wrists wide enough
to carry the hem. My skin, dark
golden iris, proves my saving grace.

Let me annihilate your sins
with love. Let us hold hands
and bask within the shuddered

stares of strangers. Behind
every Superman: the shadow
of a woman like me.

*****

from In Solidarity with Fate

I wanted to comfort him but what my mother taught me
about comfort can be found in my first abortion.
Nothing curdles soul like the feeling of one sucked up.
Smarter men say we are party to a cycle,
that something generational dictates my choices.
Braver men fess up to nothing.
This must be labor, thinking
the choker’s decision divinely instilled.

Phantom Hue would like a word with what has occurred. In its varied vision, the past and present gather their present-perfect questions. And then they are posed---toward transmutation. Butler remembers as re-cognition, as reorientation. Phantom Hue’s deft poems consider the weight of learning and knowing our histories simultaneously. We can courageously begin with our “gold-spun blood,” but we must also reckon “after the ashes settle on our campus rooftops.” And Butler will ask bravely, beautifully: “what can I build from the sown?”

—Renia White, author of Casual Conversation

“There must be a victim for every victor,” Butler writes. But who can we blame? And how do heritage and the body survive the awful weight of trauma and injustice? Phantom Hue is a powerful tribute to the body and its shimmering survival through the persistence of trauma, the suffering of women, and the insidious evils of racism. With dimension and searing insight, Butler moves between past and present, a ghostly and lyrical witness to sexual assault on a great-great-grandmother, microaggressions at a library reading, a mother’s haunting photograph, a painful dream. These poems ask what “the origin / of disconnection” is, and how we can offer care and reverence to the past when it is studded with pain.

—Arah Ko, author of Brine Orchid

Phantom Hue, Schyler Butler’s poignant debut collection, gives the reader a visceral view of how America’s legacies of racism, gendered bigotry, and stark socioeconomic divides continue to haunt and strike. Butler makes exquisite, unflinching portraits of the soul and the body processing strife’s ramifications, and of the willful heart making its way toward new shades of reckoning. Butler’s poetic voice is honest, potent, surprising, and promises to keep swiftly dazzling for years and years to come.

—Marcus Jackson, author of Love’s Austere and Lonely Offices

November 2026
96 pp
Trade paper – 6 X 9"
$18
ISBN 978-1-960327-22-2
Emerging Voices