The Birds of Poverty Ridge by Brad Buchanan

The Birds of Poverty Ridge, by Brad Buchanan, is a searching meditation on the author’s return—after catastrophic illness—to a changed and changing life. These poems explore both old and new neighborhoods as they observe seasonal rituals, mourn the loss of love, trace the tenuous renewal of desire, and celebrate our ongoing transformations.

In this powerful, moving collection of seventy-two finely-crafted poems, Brad Buchanan takes us on a journey from an almost unbearably painful exploration of cancer and divorce to a Zen-like appreciation of the small, redeeming moments of life that console us in times of grief and loneliness. Buchanan has a genius for details, which he uses to create an emotional landscape that is, at one and the same time, lyrical, terrifying, and redemptive.

–Mary Mackey, author of The Jaguars That Prowl Our Dreams (Marsh Hawk Press, 2018), winner of The Eric Hoffer Award for Best Book Published by A Small Press

“Who gets custody of the shared memories?” asks the speaker in “How to Take Stock of an Empty House.” This question reverberates throughout Brad Buchanan’s The Birds of Poverty Ridge, a book which takes stock of a life in the wake of illness and recovery, the end of a long marriage, and a move downward on the socio-economic ladder. As readers of Buchanan know, he is a survivor, a poet who finds beauty even in the darkest times. As Pound observed, “What thou lovest well remains,” and Buchanan’s love for his children, for grace in all its guises, and for the transformative power of language, grant custody of a sustaining light. Read The Birds of Poverty Ridge and hear the cries of a neighborhood, and of our shared world, “in all its beauty / and disrepute.”

–Joshua McKinney, author of Sad Animal (Gunpowder Press, 2024), winner of the John Ridland Poetry Prize

How to live after marital separation and divorce, after surviving the terrors and brutalities of cancer? How to deal with the dislocations of the heart, the body, the mind–how to cross the street into an unknown neighborhood which is both literal and spiritual? These are questions the poems in Brad Buchanan’s newest book The Birds of Poverty Ridge document and explore, traveling with deft musicality through the memories and experiences, “shuffling ghosts in their bright array.” The poems grapple with themselves—the voices of songbird, family man, victim, caretaker, priest—but together they are a choir; they build a shared “museum of compassion.” As the speaker says in “What Will Survive in Us is Love”: “those in whom / love is so strong / can suffer almost anything…”

–Susan Kelly-DeWitt, author of Frangible Operas (Gunpowder Press, 2024)