Bloom

"Simmons B. Buntin writes with scrupulous attention to the agency of love in a wounded and venomous world. Whether he considers Hiroshima or dead albatrosses, the small marvels of finches or ladybugs, or his daughter's accidental plunge through a plate glass window, his poems celebrate nature, family, and the healing power of beauty."
Alison Hawthorne Deming

Set largely in the rugged but resplendent borderlands of Arizona and Sonora, Mexico-and ranging as far afield as the Israeli desert, the Sweden of his mother's youth, the Midway Atoll, and Hiroshima, Japan, on the 40th anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb-Simmons B. Buntin's second collection of poems gathers unexpected insight from our built and natural landscapes to blossom into poems of striking beauty and stunning realization.

'Shine', the book's first section, ranges from the violet light of the last night in Eden to a daughter's coming of age and desire. 'Flare', the second section, weaves from roadside wildflowers to an evening in SoHo to a mother's memory of Nazi bombers overhead before her own storied migrations to America. And 'Inflorescence', the final section, braids the experience of a daughter recovering from emergency surgery following a severe accident, with the slow and mesmerizing bloom-or inflorescence-of the yard's magnificent agave.

In reading the poems of this finely crafted and lyrical book, you'll find that-like the daughter releasing ladybugs in the poem 'Shower'-the open room of your heart, too, will be filled with 'pure red joy'.

Simmons B. Buntin is the American author of one previous book of poems, Riverfall, published by Salmon Poetry in 2005. His award-winning poetry and prose have appeared in numerous North American and European journals and anthologies. He is the founding editor of the acclaimed international journal Terrain.org: A Journal of the Built & Natural Environments, for which he also writes a regular editorial. He is the recipient of the Colorado Artists Fellowship for Poetry, an Academy of American Poets prize, and grants by the Arizona Commission on the Arts and Tucson Pima Arts Council. He is an avid photographer, website designer, and all-around rabble-rouser who lives with his wife and two daughters in the Sonoran desert of southern Arizona.