Salt & Roses

Buffy McKay is a poet of power. In Salt & Roses, she looks hard at life across a range of free verse, villanelles, and haikus, and leaves us with poignant and glimmering lines that can stop you dead in your tracks. When she captures the ethereal essence of inner and outer landscapes, you can imagine her with the likes of Mary Oliver and Elizabeth Bishop, sipping tea and swapping lines about fish.

-Doug Pope, author of The Way to Gaamaak Cove

The gorgeous poems in Buffy McKay's Salt & Roses traverse the wilds of Alaska and comb the watery landscapes of Rhode Island and Scotland. McKay's connection to each place runs deep, and these roots she shares in a generous and loving way. In one poem, she illustrates how ancestry lives in a smoked fish and her mother's word for it: dunghnak. This collection sensually explores the lands dear to McKay, family homelands which nourish her body as well as her soul. She captures life's beauty with a wide-angle lens. Yes, there are salt and roses within these pages, but also cancer, death, loss, and regret. More than a book of poems, Salt and Roses is a book of prayers.

-Martha Amore, author of In the Quiet Season and Other Stories

Pomace stubbles the pint glass

Buffy in Scotland

One day of sun, three of rain

Buffy in a cabin in Skagway, Alaska

My hand, fingers spread

Holds my chest

The river is the voice of always

Adept as the moon of your fingernail

Describes the skin on my body

October

Buffy practicing her regret

To her indigenous mother

Her spine creaks

She fiddles with words

To make this beautiful book

-James P. Sweeney, author of A Thousand Prayers: Alaska Climbing Expedition: Marine Life Solidarity