Breaking To pay by check please use this order form. We are pleased to take orders from retailers. Email us with details about your order or call us at 207-837-5760. The poems in Breaking explore our births, deaths, loves, and livelihoods . . .our “breaks.” When we experience a break, space opens for healing. This collection traverses not only these breaks, but also where we can go on the other side of the break to allow room for us to heal and grow. POETRY / General ISBN: 978-1-956056_93_8 (print; softcover; perfect bound) Released November 4, 2025 | Copyright 2025 76 pages |
|
 |
|
|
Growing up around hills and lakes in New Jersey, northwest of New York City, Buffy Aakaash has moved between small towns, big cities, and rural queer communities for the last almost forty years, farming, writing, growing food, and doing healing work. Engaged in poetry most of his life, he is inspired by the beings both human and non-human in the many places he has lived, visited, and explored—New Mexico high deserts, several big cities, the US west coast, Tennessee’s hills and hollers, as well as extensive travels in Mexico. Currently, he resides in Vermont’s Green Mountains with his four-legged fellow traveler/hiker, Bodhi the pug. Aakaash’s poems have been published by Sweety Cat Press, New Feathers, Main Street Rag, The Brussels Review, and numerous others. He authored the 2022 chapbook, Untangling the Knots, which was nominated for the Vermont Book Awards. His poem “The Beauty Before Us” won the Poetry Society of Vermont’s 2022 Marion Gleason Memorial Award. In 1994 Aakaash received an MFA in playwriting from Columbia University. In addition to being a writer, he freelances as a media designer and manuscript editor. Some of his previously published poetry can be viewed at www.BuffyAakaashPoetry.com.
|
|
|
“Buffy Aakaash’s poems are heart-rich and earth-rich and time-rich. The cycles of the natural world parallel the cycles of loss and love experienced by the speaker. Love turns into loss, winter transforms into spring. Aakaash tracks and makes visible the rise and fall of intimacy between lovers and among family in language that is luminous and precise. Rooted in the chaos and breakthroughs of middle age, these poems enact how attentiveness to others and to the world can nourish and alter the soul, the body. These poems are ambitious and rich with unpredictable imagery and hard-won insight.” “Buffy Aakaash’s debut collection is a host of tender moments, passion flowing, longing, and starting over. With an opening quote explaining fractals, this book gives us the chaos of loss, love, and the gods of nature and place, as in his poem ‘Toads’—‘ears perk / to seductive songs’; and in ‘One Tennessee Summer’—‘whippoorwill shamans sing this life into being.’” “These lyrical and courageous poems ask each of us ‘Who am I in all of this? / Who will I be in all of that?’ Showered with empathy and alive with details, Breaking explores the boundaries of what sustains us in times of loss. These are poems of beginnings and reclamations, at once tender and tough and joyful.” “Covering a range of human experience from conception to death, and love to loss, and the landscapes of both fractals and arroyos, these poems are evocative in both imagery and in emotion, yet without dripping into mere sentimentality.” —Matthew Dickerson, author of The Voices of Rivers and Birds in the Sky, Fish in the Sea |
|
|
|
News and Reviews |
|
|
|
|
