Mary Lou Buschi
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Paddock

Mary Lou Buschi’s stunning full-length collection Paddock gives articulation to the hot core of grief and trauma by stripping away the noise of contemporary life. Voiced instead in a timeless language redolent of myth, Buschi reintroduces us to the power of classical theatrical conventions like chorus, repetition, and invocation, only in Paddock’s case, the speakers are girls and women whose lives—in Buschi’s crystalline diction—are given epic dimensions. In reading Paddock, I’m reminded of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dicteé as well as Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s Song. Like these groundbreaking books of poetry, Buschi’s Paddock believes the world must be made strange—and we must sometimes be estranged from it—in order for us to see more clearly the grief we carry, the violence we endure, drawing around every word a sacred space in which to “[t]ry to imagine building a particular world for such a shape.” Indeed, try to imagine a world tender enough, attentive enough to “carve mothers out of black sky,” to find “another ocean growing inside that small ocean,” and you’ll see the world Buschi has built.

—Lesley Jenike, author of Holy Island and Punctum.

I’ll tell you how great this book is: I made my husband sit down so I could read to him from it. Mary Lou Buschi’s superb Paddock is a fraught dialogue between two girls, seemingly on a pre-birth or post-death plane, a “made-up kingdom,” as Girl 2 puts it, while an archetypal chorus offers commentary and lament. The girls’ speech has the sly wit of Beckett and Lewis Carroll, and evokes the weirdest, loneliest aspects of the natural world. The poems take us on a dangerous visit to faerie, a uterine ocean where memories or premonitions of violation float past, and where prospective parents are spoken about in 3rd person, lured and reviled. Like all the best poetry, this predicament could be a metaphor for many different narratives, infertility perhaps, miscarriage, definitely a history of sexual cruelty, but it’s also extraordinarily expressive of the exhausting stasis of quarantine. If you, like me, are unlikely ever to be consoled about certain experiences, this book that refuses to be consoled will be a guide and companion. In this moment, truly, the darkness of this book is the brightest thing around.

—Patrick Donnelly, author of Little-Known Operas, Nocturnes of the Brothel of Ruin, and The Charge.

Mary Lou Buschi’s Paddock is like a game of hide and seek, a primer on seeking. Structured like a play, the collection follows two girls on a quest for a mother, and a chorus narrates, empathizes, and passes judgment. "I want to go back!” says one girl but the mother “is no longer anywhere, who was once where we could go back.” Surrealism, hope’s "unrelenting tick,” and dream are the guiding forces here. Buschi’s language is spare, cryptic, beguiling, like the “Fractals in the light” the chorus names. Sexual danger and maternal longing animate these pages, urging us to “diagnose the heart."

—Catherine Barnett, author of Human Hours, Games of Boxes, and Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced.

Paddock

Lily Poetry Review Press, 2021
Available for purchase here

Praise for Paddock: 

Mary Lou Buschi’s stunning full-length collection Paddock gives articulation to the hot core of grief and trauma by stripping away the noise of contemporary life. Voiced instead in a timeless language redolent of myth, Buschi reintroduces us to the power of classical theatrical conventions like chorus, repetition, and invocation, only in Paddock’s case, the speakers are girls and women whose lives—in Buschi’s crystalline diction—are given epic dimensions. In reading Paddock, I’m reminded of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dicteé as well as Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s Song. Like these groundbreaking books of poetry, Buschi’s Paddockbelieves the world must be made strange—and we must sometimes be estranged from it—in order for us to see more clearly the grief we carry, the violence we endure, drawing around every word a sacred space in which to “[t]ry to imagine building a particular world for such a shape.” Indeed, try to imagine a world tender enough, attentive enough to “carve mothers out of black sky,” to find “another ocean growing inside that small ocean,” and you’ll see the world Buschi has built. 

—Lesley Jenike, author of Holy Island and Punctum.

I’ll tell you how great this book is: I made my husband sit down so I could read to him from it. Mary Lou Buschi’s superb Paddock is a fraught dialogue between two girls, seemingly on a pre-birth or post-death plane, a “made-up kingdom,” as Girl 2 puts it, while an archetypal chorus offers commentary and lament. The girls’ speech has the sly wit of Beckett and Lewis Carroll, and evokes the weirdest, loneliest aspects of the natural world. The poems take us on a dangerous visit to faerie, a uterine ocean where memories or premonitions of violation float past, and where prospective parents are spoken about in 3rd person, lured and reviled. Like all the best poetry, this predicament could be a metaphor for many different narratives, infertility perhaps, miscarriage, definitely a history of sexual cruelty, but it’s also extraordinarily expressive of the exhausting stasis of quarantine. If you, like me, are unlikely ever to be consoled about certain experiences, this book that refuses to be consoled will be a guide and companion. In this moment, truly, the darkness of this book is the brightest thing around.

—Patrick Donnelly, author of Little-Known Operas, Nocturnes of the Brothel of Ruin, and The Charge.

Mary Lou Buschi’s Paddock is like a game of hide and seek, a primer on seeking. Structured like a play, the collection follows two girls on a quest for a mother, and a chorus narrates, empathizes, and passes judgment. "I want to go back!” says one girl but the mother “is no longer anywhere, who was once where we could go back.” Surrealism, hope’s "unrelenting tick,” and dream are the guiding forces here. Buschi’s language is spare, cryptic, beguiling, like the “Fractals in the light” the chorus names. Sexual danger and maternal longing animate these pages, urging us to “diagnose the heart."

—Catherine Barnett, author of Human Hours, Games of Boxes, and Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced.

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