Poetry

"A ribbon of Appalachia winds through Kate Buckley’s vigorous voice in her debut collection of poems, A Wild Region. It was my pleasure to choose her as the winner of the 2008 James Hearst Poetry Prize for the North American Review, and it is an equal pleasure to welcome this book of poems, crafted from the patterns of speech of the wild region Buckley loves and the wildness of its people, too."

— Molly Peacock

"Kate Buckley's poems are dark prayers and lyrical ballads, infused with mystery and awe... And the stories these poems tell — finely crafted as the poems are — are stories that speak to all of us, accessible and clear for all their complicated depth, 'universal' precisely because they're so deeply personal, and so deeply felt. There is so much stunning language in this collection, so much accuracy and grace, and there are so many images that take my breath away... Kate Buckley shows us how the beautiful and the brutal can not only coexist alongside one another, but exist within one another. Hers is a necessary and welcome new voice."

— Cecilia Woloch

"True to her Kentucky roots, Kate Buckley is a born storyteller with a poet’s transforming vision of the world’s details informed by loss and exile."

— Julie Kuzneski Wrinn for the Betty Gabehart Prize, Kentucky Women Writers Conference

Kate Buckley's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in a variety of journals including: The Adirondack Review, The Heartland Review, New Southerner, Slipstream, and Spillway, and in the book, Tide Pools, an Anthology of Orange County Poetry.

Kate has two books forthcoming for 2008: A Wild Region: Poems & Paintings (Moon Tide Press) and a full length book, Follow Me Down, to be released in the latter part of 2008 (Tebot Bach). She was also a finalist for the 2007 Joy Bale Boone Poetry Prize, winner of the 2007 Gabehart Prize for Imaginative Writing for poetry, and winner of the North American Review's 2008 James Hearst Poetry Prize as selected by Molly Peacock.