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Poetry
All poems below have been published in literary magazines as indicated.
Copyright @2024 Katie Budris
Heather Lanier
author of Raising a Rare Girl
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.
Kathleen McGookey
author of Instructions for My Imposter
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.
Dawn Leas
author of A Person Worth Knowing
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.
Jack Ridl
author of Practicing to Walk Like a Heron
The narrator in Katie Budris’s Prague in Synthetics is no tourist snapping pictures then heading on to the next sight. In these finely wrought poems, Budris “will spread [her] hands/ and let bone and ash mingle/ with grass, water, air.” You will wander in language rich with the complex textures of this landscape, one that merges legend with fact, loss with now, rubble with renewal, war with dance, Budvar, bridges, the Holocaust, stained glass, a single red begonia, and most deeply the realization that this culture not only preserves but also never separates sorrow and delight.
Peter Cooley
author of Divine Margins
Don’t expect travelogues when you read these densely textured poems which explore the wonders of Prague. Be prepared for some interrogating travel in the human mind and heart.
Select Publications
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