Jenna Butler draws on her own experiences of her grandmother's disappearance into senile dementia to reassemble a sensual world in longpoem form that positively crackles with imagery and rhythm. Identities and memories flow and flicker as she strings together fragments of narrative into stories that comprise one woman's life. It entwines her disappearing life with that of the persona of the woman's granddaughter through a choreographed confusion of identities: of she's and I's. Few poets could execute this with convincing solemnity, while simultaneously recovering the dignity of the sufferer and her loved ones. Butler does. Poetry lovers, critics and scholars, and readers who crave a deft style charged with honest emotion should read Wells.

"Similarly emphasizing the close connections among place, identity, and loss, Jenna Butler's Wells memorializes a grandmother living with Alzheimer's disease by evoking the sounds,smells, and textures of the English village on the North Sea where she has spent her life... Meticulously crafted, the book consists of eight sections of six poems each in which Butler charts the stages of her grandmother's 'vanish[ing]' and shores up the details of her world in long-lined stanzas of varying lengths.... Butler's emphasis on the persistence of her grandmother's embodied identity here is politically important." - Canadian Literature