Cindy Buchanan‘s mesmerizing chapbook moves with centripetal force around the story of losing—yet not losing—a child. Teeming with love, warmth, and beauty, Learning to Breathe intimately charts a mind searching for answers, a heart as it slowly breaks, and a soul in pursuit of the sublime. The poems bravely confront what it means to grieve when the object of grief is not dead, only gone—”when I turn to face/the sun but find it missing.” Buchanan conveys a higher understanding of longing and love that breaks and warms the heart all at once.
–Kim Kralowec, author of We retreat into the stillness of our own bones, The Saplings Think of Us as Young.
Cindy Buchanan‘s stunning and heart-wrenching debut depicts a harrowing world in which a speaker-mother has lost her daughter to addiction. Saturated with emotion—sorrow, guilt, and most of all, grief—these poems, heavy as they are in their implications, lift off the page with their poignant, elegantly-crafted lines. “I had to turn from not you/ and not call her by your name,” the speaker says of another to her absent daughter. The natural world is a solace, yet can never be enough to turn the speaker from her loss, as she begs: “Pick up the phone. Hear/ my blood pound in your veins.” We ourselves experience the pounding as we move through this collection, each poem building on the last to create a final sound—a swoosh, a pulse—that ultimately chooses breath. Learning to Breathe is a survivor’s story and a must-read for anyone who’s ever experienced loss—which is all of us.
–Jeanine Walker, author of The Two of Them Might Outlast Me
“How to grieve a loss that’s ongoing? How to tell a story when the main character is missing? The poems in Cindy Buchanan’s Learning to Breathe contend with these difficult questions and so many more with deftly wrought, emotionally wrenching poems that paint a vivid portrait of a daughter’s absence, a mother’s love, and the messy complexities of addiction. While this collection roams the house of grief and does not flinch away from painful truths, it also attends—at crucial times, in aching ways—to beauty, making space for the flowers that remain in view, enduring, to bloom.”
–Gabrielle Bates, author of Judas Goat
The poems in Cindy Buchanan’s Learning to Breathe capture the heartbreak and powerlessness of being the parent of an addicted loved one. These poems are full of love, loss, and that eternal question, “Why?” I know this grief, and Buchanan renders it well.
–Susan Vespoli, author of Blame It on the Serpent
“How do you cry a prayer?” Cindy Buchanan’s poems are beautiful, breathtaking expressions of a mother’s remembrances of a daughter. As a bereft mother myself, this collection profoundly touched me and gave me comfort.
–Susan Knox, creative nonfiction and short story writer, author of Financial Basics, a Money-Management Guide for Students.
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