Hungry Ghosts - Cindy Buchanan

In Cindy Buchanan's bracing and beautiful collection Hungry Ghosts, we are never far from nature - its solace, yes, but also its indifference to our human plight. And while nature may be "unmoved," the reader is not, for Buchanan writes poems of great feeling, luminous clarity, and vivid detail. We follow the speaker on an itinerant childhood in Alaska, "a place so far north / it might as well have been the moon." Here, with an abusive stepfather, the speaker is "erased / amid the sparse trees / and unrelenting snow." Later, we witness "how it feels to be a mother who howls" as she copes with a child in the throes of addiction. Finally, the speaker turns to the hills of northern Mexico and the forests of the Pacific Northwest in her search for a spiritual way forward. And if her moments of peace and transcendence are necessarily "brief," they are nonetheless powerful - and powerfully presented.

-Bill Hollands, author, Mangrove

Rooted in vivid landscapes and quiet reflection, Hungry Ghosts is a lyrical meditation on grief, memory, and the rituals that help us endure. Cindy Buchanan's poems reckon with childhood abuse and the ache of her grown daughter's addiction, breathing through sorrow and lamentation in the terrains of Alaska, Seattle, and Baja, Mexico. These verses find both solace and delight in seals diving for fish on rocky shores, omens in the flight of eagles, and love kneaded into Christmas morning bears. Each line is a breath, a pause, a moment of stillness. Buchanan's language is sensual and unflinching, guiding readers through memory's terrain where ghosts linger - where, ultimately, breath transforms both the speaker and her readers.

-Brooke Lehmann, author, Of Salt and Song

These poems, set in the hardscrabble American West of the last 60 years, speak truth to a daughter-self and mother-self with compassion and wonder. There are real struggles depicted here - abuse, addiction - with insight and plain-spoken beauty. What a wise and moving collection.

-Kathleen Flenniken, author, Dressing in the Dark