About / klaʊdz /
The making of meaning from ephemera is a deeply human activity. The poems in this collection arise from this impulse. The title / klaʊdz / is the phonetic transcription of ‘clouds’— the symbols indicate how to pronounce the word. Like clouds, sounds are re-combinable elements with shifting meanings and outcomes both consequential and transient, as well as subject to randomness and governed by physics. Each poem plays with its subject— roams within its confines and pushes against (sometimes through) the walls of its meanings.
The topics range from the concrete— “hive,” “camisole,” “lantern”—
to the abstract— “resurrection,” “absence,” “derivation.”
Launch party
Please join Mary on January 30, 2022, 2 pm, for the virtual book launch of her chapbook. Register to join this free event.
Praise for / klaʊdz /
Each poem in Mary Buchinger’s / klaʊdz /, is a meditation in which shapes of thought enter the mind and then recede— as if gazing at a solitary cloud forming into an image always a breath away from dissolving. These wondrously challenging poems are definitional yet amorphous, terse, yet expansive. They are stunning helixes of sound and language twisting together and scattering, thinning and thickening like a congregation of starlings. And like starlings, they are eerily beautiful— and in flight.
— Regie Gibson, author of Storms Beneath The Skin
These poems surprise and delight! Mary Buchinger hasn’t just written about clouds; she’s harnessed the experience of cloud watching. The variety of visual forms coupled with fanciful titles and the use of words like “salamanderly” make me feel as though I’m cloud watching with a playful friend, yet the poet’s extensive vocabulary and explorations of desire and faith turn this into a more mature experience than the childhood pastime I thought I knew.
–Katie Manning, author of Tasty Other and editor of Whale Road Review
About the author
Mary Buchinger has written several books of poetry, including e i n f
ü h l u n g/in feeling (Main Street Rag, 2018), Aerialist (Gold Wake, 2015, finalist for the May Swenson Poetry Award, semifinalist for The Journal /Wheeler and Perugia Press Prizes), and Roomful of Sparrows (Finishing Line, 2008; New Women’s Voices Series semifinalist), and Virology (forthcoming, Lily Poetry Review Books). Her work was selected for the Boston Raining Poetry Project and is permanently installed in the city of Cambridge, where she served as Poetry Ambassador. Her poetry has appeared in AGNI, DIAGRAM, Gargoyle, Interim, Nimrod, [PANK], phoebe, Plume, Salamander, Salt Hill Journal, Sugar House Review, The Boston Globe, The Cortland Review, The Hollins Critic, The Massachusetts Review, Queen Mob’s Teahouse, and elsewhere. Buchinger grew up on a farm in Michigan, served in Ecuador as a Peace Corps volunteer, and earned a doctorate in linguistics from Boston University. She is president of the New England Poetry Club (founded in 1915 by Robert Frost, Amy Lowell, Conrad Aiken) and professor of English and communication studies at the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences in Boston. She lives in Cambridge with her husband, cats and dog.
Where to buy
The book is available through Lily Poetry Review Books, Amazon, and your independent bookseller.
Sample poems
