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Flyover Country
by B.J. Buckley
48 Poems ~ 83 pages
Price: $20.00
Publisher: Pine Row Press
ISBN #: 978-1-963110-08-1
To Order: Pinerow.com
ABOUT THE BOOK:
If you have never visited “Big Sky Country,” namely the state of Montana, don’t bother buying a plane ticket. For the modest price of $20.00, order a copy of Flyover Country, by B.J. Buckley. This superb collection of poems is your ticket to all the riches Montana offers. This is not a travelogue. Buckley puts your feet in a horse’s stirrups. She takes you where the breeze is strong enough to blow the hair off a dog! You smell the wild earth, hear the voices of the strong folks who live there, and who wouldn’t live anywhere else despite its hardships.
ADVANCE PRAISE:
“B.J. Buckley is the best of Montana in human form. And since I can never get enough Big Sky, I spent deep time in this little book’s lyrically dense pages and had my heart race its landscape-spanning soar across its life and death teeter-tottering at intersections of season and section. And then I read it again to absorb more. Feathers, fur, and human frailty reside in Flyover Country. It is powerfully and poetically all that this wild western slice of paradise can be. Thank you, B.J.”
–Joseph Drew Lanham, author of The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature
“In Flyover Country, B.J. Buckley writes about what used to be called, in old geography textbooks, ‘the Great American Desert.’ Her poems connect readers to the animals, wild and domesticated; the frequently dangerous weather; and the people whose lives continue to be dependent on that weather and those animals. She shows us the toughness, loneliness, and pain that these lives contain, but she also celebrates their connections: people to people, people to animals, people to land. This book is an essential read for anyone who wants to understand ‘flyover country.’ It is beautiful, wonderfully skillful, and deeply poignant.”
–Jane Elkington Wohl, PhD, author of Beasts in Snow
“This is a place to land. This book–a country to explore. Follow the marks made by the author’s memories, longings requited and lingering, and whisperings that tell of something but not of all of it. B.J. Buckley invites you, with each poetic glance out the window, to take note of the signposts meant to guide us all home.”
–Jamie K. Reaser, PhD. Author of RidgeLines: A View of Nature and Human Nature
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Montana poet and writer B.J. Buckley has worked as a teaching artist in Arts-in-Schools/Communities programs throughout the West and Midwest for five decades. She lives with her sweetheart and critters in beer barley country along the Rocky Mountain Front west of Great Falls.
Her prizes and awards include a Wyoming Arts Council Literature Fellowship; The Cumberland Poetry Review’s Robert Penn Warren Narrative Poetry Prize; the Poets & Writers “Writers Exchange Award” in poetry; the Rita Dove Poetry Prize from the Center for Women Writers at Salem College, Winston-Salen, NC; the Joy Harjo Prize from CutThroat: A Journal of the Arts; and the 2012 Comstock Review Poetry Prize.
She has been awarded residencies at The Ucross Foundation, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Colrain Manuscript Conference. Her poems have appeared widely in both print and on-line journals, including Grub Street, December, Big Sky Journal, Visions International, Hole in the Head Review, Dogwood, Pine Row, Patterson Literary Review, and The Inflectionist Review.
Her work is included in several anthologies, including Leaning Into the Wind, Woven on the Wind, and Crazy Woman Creek, (Houghton-Mifflin); Wyoming Fencelines, a collection of poems about fences and other boundaries by Wyoming authors; and Birds in the Hand: Fiction and Poetry About Birds (Henry Holt). Her chapbook, In January, the Geese, won the 35th Anniversary 2021 Comstock Poetry Chapbook Prize, and her full-length collection, Night Music, is forthcoming in late 2024 from Finishing Line Press.
FROM THE BOOK:
Snow on the Backs of Cattle
by B.J. Buckley
They seem, at first, dark formations of stone,
half drifted in, bunched and volcanic, rectangular
with oddly shaped outcroppings, sun glinting
on crystal, fringes of gray-green and palest
yellow: lichen, sage, bleached dry grasses.
Then small puffs of steam, their breath, shift
and snuffle, soft voices lowing, hooves cracking
the frost. In two places near the herd’s edge,
bright splashes of red where calves dropped
in the darkness, where rough tongues licked
them clean and muzzles nudged small bodies
until they stood, shaking with wonder, to
search out the straining udders and drink.
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