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Rich with both lyricism and story, Mid-Bloom is a gorgeous collection about how we fuel ourselves in the face of grief. How do we keep ourselves not just living but truly alive in the midst of life’s great, tragic promise: that all this must end? Potatoes, canoe rides, cigarettes, family, memory—the poems examine delightfully surprising specifics, showing the tender bravery required in our courage to keep on. By turns accessible and awe-inducing, Budris’s collection illustrates that poetry itself is prime sustenance for us all.
-Heather Lanier, author of Raising a Rare Girl and The Story You Tell Yourself With imagery that ignites the imagination and memories that map the mud and muck of loss, grief, and illness, Mid-Bloom takes its readers on a journey in and through, to and from the past and present until the two coalesce in a moment of understanding as a daughter fights cancer two decades after she loses her mother to it. Budris questions her green thumb in several poems, but I hope she doesn’t doubt her poetic prowess. She nimbly wields her pen poem after poem to breathe life into a collection that isn’t “mid-bloom,” but one that is beautifully and heartachingly in full-bloom.
-Dawn Leas, author of A Person Worth Knowing, Take Something When You Go, and I Know When to Keep Quiet Katie Budris’s poems explore seemingly ordinary moments--a family’s weeknight dinner, catching snowflakes, a mother caring for her daughter’s scraped knee--through the twin lenses of grief and memory. After Budris’s mother died young, “mid-bloom,” of cancer, these moments become anything but ordinary. Together, they weave a backdrop for the magical, dreamlike space in the final poem “If Things Were Otherwise,” where mother and daughter once again share morning coffee and soothing conversation, understanding each other more deeply than they ever did in life. These perceptive and tender poems resonate with love that abides, even after loss.
-Kathleen McGookey, author of Instructions for my Imposter, Heart in a Jar, and Stay |
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Katie's second chapbook, Mid-Bloom, is a collection of poems exploring her experience as a young breast cancer survivor paralleled with the loss of her mother to cancer several decades earlier. Now available for purchase through Finishing Line Press or on Amazon. Her debut chapbook, Prague in Synthetics, is also available for purchase through Finishing Line Press or on Amazon, and centers on her experiences studying abroad as part of Western Michigan University's Prague Summer Program. |
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