Tiny Little Beauty by Bobbi Buchanan

(2 customer reviews)

$13.99

 

Tiny Little Beauty is a collection of short poems inspired by nature and the students at the rural community college where Bobbi Buchanan taught academic writing for five years. The poems are all free verse and revolve around themes of guilt, depression, abandonment, addiction, abuse, death, recovery, and the healing power of nature.

 

“Every tiny little beauty tells you her secret,” Bobbi Buchanan writes in these tender poems that address “the broken, the beaten, the hard of heart.” Our scars, grief, and hurtful memories are eased here against an unspoiled backdrop of plants and trees and wildlife. Even “the crooked elms and the bony oaks / the ragged crowns of cottonwoods” offer consolation. The footpath to healing is marked by the poet’s attentiveness to nature; her words carve a trail to recovery. “Every morning / the earth cracks / open a dream for you,” Buchanan declares, and we are made more resilient after reading every little beauty in this compassionate and candid collection by such a gifted writer.

–Marianne Worthington, poetry editor, Still: The Journal

 

Tiny Little Beauty is an extraordinary collection of spare, beautifully crafted poems that read like a cross between Rumi and William Carlos Williams, though the bare-boned, exquisite vision is Bobbi Buchanan‘s own. In structure, inked like tree trunks in a Japanese etching, the images blaze forth with love and hallelujah. Lovely, lovely meditations on love and loss, of breaking and healing, of the grace that gives the strength to move on.

–Wanda Fries, author of Ash Grove 

 

Tiny Little Beauty is big on beauty of purpose and usefulness-a phrase taken from the opening poem (“The Lessons of the Spider”). The natural world serves as a backdrop to this brave collection where we find humility and grace-in places where kittens are born under muddy porches (“Orphan’s Song”), and where cottonwoods grow with thick and heavy hearts (“Eating Beauty”). She takes us on a journey of heartbreak and resurrection, where lie stones of grief too beautiful, too heavy to bear (“A Mother in Infamy”). These are tightly woven poems that remind us of our humanity. I loved Tiny Little Beauty for its expansive longing to rise above adversity, for its sense of hope, its tender urging for us to come to know a joy deep in our bones (“Starting Over”).

–Jessica Thompson, author of Bullets and Blank Bibles

 

 

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Tiny Little Beauty

by Bobbi Buchanan

$13.99, paper

Bobbi Buchanan is the is co-author of Higher Love: The Miraculous Story of a Family and author of Listen: Essays on Living the Good Life, published by Ginkgo Leaf Press in September 2013, and founding editor of New Southerner, an e-zine that focuses on self-sufficiency, environmental stewardship, and local economies. She received the 2007 Emerging Writers Award in Nonfiction from the Southern Women Writers Conference at Berry College. And the 2010 prize in nonfiction from Still: The Journal for her essay “In the Woods,” which was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her essays and poems have been published in The New York Times, Brain, Child Magazine, Sojourners, Vine Leaves Literary Journal, The Louisville Review, The James Dickey Review, Kudzu, The Pikeville Review, the Motif anthologies Come What May (MotesBooks, 2010) and All the Livelong Day (MotesBooks, 2011), Greenprints, Literary Mama, and Flycatcher, among other publications. She teaches academic writing part time at Bellarmine University. A member of the advisory board for the Green River Writers, Bobbi is co-founder of the Homegrown Art, Music & Spoken Word Show, an open-mic and arts exhibition series held bimonthly in Shepherdsville, Ky., and presented in partnership with Color Your City, a substance abuse prevention and recovery charity working to provide local residents the tools they need to create art and outlets for sharing their work. Bobbi teaches creative writing at the Bullitt County Detention Center as part of Color Your City’s Art for Inmates in Recovery Program, which focus on using the arts as a means of rehabilitating substance-abuse offenders-to educate them on the power of art as a mechanism for healing and stress reduction. Bobbi earned a bachelor’s in journalism at the University of Kentucky and an MFA in writing at Spalding University. She lives in Cox’s Creek, KY.

2 reviews for Tiny Little Beauty by Bobbi Buchanan

  1. Wes Shofner –

    Buchanon writes poetry of strength, grit, and unflinching truth delivered with heart and grace. An elegance of economy keeps her observation poignant and meaningful, and every word carries weight. I’ve carried this book in my briefcase for weeks and have not passed a day without opening it for a moment of reflection, a reality check, or a reminder of beauty.

  2. Jessica Thompson –

    I loved Tiny Little Beauty for it’s expansive longing to rise above adversity, for its message of hope,it’s tender urging for us to know “a joy deep in our bones.” The world needs more brave poets like Bobbi Buchanan.

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