The Book of Shores

The Book of Shores

by Mary Buchinger

Released February 12, 2024

Mary Buchinger's The Book of Shores is a meditation into the nature of being, one that recognizes that "there once was a self/ known only to self// who carried the sea/ wherever she went." The verses in this collection are both restless and still, formally inventive and thrumming with lines that are "always talking/ about more than one thing." It's a collection that takes risks to name the ineffable, to chart the topography of one's interior landscape, to "[l]ift its lithosphere/ as you would/ the lid of a chest" so that we might explore "within its rifts and/ escarpment something in there/ making new an immensity/ that will not diminish."

-Brian Turner, author of The Wild Delight of Wild Things

Mary Buchinger grew up on a farm in Michigan, worked in Ecuador as a Peace Corps volunteer, and earned a doctorate in linguistics from Boston University. One of her poems is permanently installed in the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she lives and served as Poetry Ambassador. She is professor of English and communication studies at the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences in Boston and for many years served on the board of the New England Poetry Club (founded in 1915 by Robert Frost, Amy Lowell, and Conrad Aiken).