Book:

A Wild Region:
Poems & Paintings by Kate Buckley
Foreword by Cecilia Woloch
Click here to purchase a copy of A Wild Region
(Moon Tide Press, 2008)

Listen to Kate read & discuss A Wild Region
Click here to see paintings featured in the book

A Wild Region has just been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and a National Book Award.

"A ribbon of Appalachia winds through Kate Buckley’s vigorous voice in her debut collection of poems, A Wild Region. It was my pleasure to choose her as the winner of the 2008 James Hearst Poetry Prize for the North American Review, and it is an equal pleasure to welcome this book of poems, crafted from the patterns of speech of the wild region Buckley loves and the wildness of its people, too."
— Molly Peacock

"Kate Buckley's poems are dark prayers and lyrical ballads, infused with mystery and awe... And the stories these poems tell — finely crafted as the poems are — are stories that speak to all of us, accessible and clear for all their complicated depth, 'universal' precisely because they're so deeply personal, and so deeply felt. There is so much stunning language in this collection, so much accuracy and grace, and there are so many images that take my breath away... Kate Buckley shows us how the beautiful and the brutal can not only coexist alongside one another, but exist within one another. Hers is a necessary and welcome new voice."
— Cecilia Woloch

"True to her Kentucky roots, Kate Buckley is a born storyteller with a poet’s transforming vision of the world’s details informed by loss and exile."
— Julie Kuzneski Wrinn for the Betty Gabehart Prize, Kentucky Women Writers Conference

"In A Wild Region, Kate Buckley explores the connections between landscape, memory and history...Buckley's style is perfect for this task."
— G. Murray Thomas, Poetix.net: Poetry for Southern California

"Buckley is a firm believer in the value of the myths and legends that have been handed down through time and that reveal essential truths about who we are, providing a common thread of humanity that links past, present and future generations. She tries to give a sense of that in her poetry. So that while the poems in her book are set in her native Kentucky and are evocative of the hard and often desperate lives of Appalachian people to whom black lung and hunger were all too familiar, she emphasizes that they are indicative of a collective experience — stories of love and loss that everyone can relate to."
— Jennifer Erickson, Laguna Beach Independent

"...Moontide Press has designed such a setting for the gems that Kate Buckley has created. The societal memories and conscience she crafts in her poetry, the contemporary visions that she creates in her art, these precious jewels have found a Tiffany setting in A Wild Region. Orange County should be proud -- this is the best I've seen from this part of the world — and the poetry world should take note.
— Michael Kramer, poet & teacher