Poet Brief: Julianne Buchsbaum

Presently a graduate student down in Missouri, Julianne Buchsbaum has already produced some fascinating poetry. Her poems contain evocative language and there is no wasted movement as she makes unnerving observations. Highly intelligent poems that make effective, but not erudite, allusions, mostly to Greek and Roman mythology. Phonetically, some of her poems soar, such as “Slowly, Slowly Horses.” The opening stanzas almost always hook you in, such as in the poem “Thrillsville”:

When the mind begins to see the lies it loves
with eyes that could have looked elsewhere,
old pain repullulates. Errors of architecture,

errors of eros, the train ride out is not
the train ride in. Is this the kind of life
you left us for? No one has a face in the dark.

Buchsbaum’s poems have a kinetic energy, but also a shade of darkness that entangles the readers. Following is one of her harrowing pieces with stark imagery and a beautiful commingling sense of dread and positive urgency.



Clouds Swell Out

The finale of fall hangs in yellow clusters.
You can't muster

the drive required for potent acts—to hide
like the cat who eyed

each skittering leaf and churring sparrow from
a dark sanctum,

frozen, invisible, dumb—such is your will.
The world is ill

with demands it can't meet; hence, the crickets'
deaths, the rosettes

of rot, the dusky clusters, and flourishing worms.
All this confirms

your wish to divorce yourself from the vista
and phenomena

of autumn which looms from raw branches a dark
afternoon. The stark

landscape deepening its shadowed dales cannot
stray a lot

from the invincible doctrine, though owls moan
misgivings. Alone,

you watch a jet's contrail zip open the sky
and the high

clouds swell out like huge, snowy hearts disgorged.