“We need to coin a word for the feeling that happens when I read these poems. It’s singular and ecstatic and huge. It’s in my chest, near my heart. It makes me want to yell, but instead I remain silent and still inside of it, this feeling. I could stay here forever.”
—Rachel Yoder, author of Nightbitch, editor of draft: the journal of practice
“Megan Buchanan finds the sacred in the everyday and offers poems as fierce evidence, each one ‘naked as a hot pancake.’ This collection reminds us that the inevitable heartbreaks of being a person can provoke a more vivid awareness of the world around us, so that we see ‘the kid/across the teeter-totter’ and witness the hummingbirds’ ‘last sips before flying back to cacti in bisbee.’ What could be more enviable than to be ‘entirely possessed/by an ordinary magic’?” —Matthew Burgess, PhD, author of Slippers for Elsewhere, Enormous Smallness: A Story of E. E. Cummings, Make Meatballs Sing: The Life and Art of Corita Kent, and Drawing on Walls: The Story of Keith Haring
“How fierce and resilient, what a tremendous and tender heart. Clothesline Religion is gorgeous, powerful. I was utterly enrapt, reading it out in the yard under the full sun. And transformed—the book inspired me to take my own daughter out of school for a road trip, time for just her and me. Mother and daughter.” —Robin MacArthur, Half Wild (PEN New England award winner) and Heart Spring Mountain
“Clothesline Religion offers each reader a chance to hang out in the opened air with the extraordinary Megan Buchanan. Each poem has a lived-in magic, longing transformed by candor, and candor, by music.” —Verandah Porche, author of Sudden Eden
“Megan Buchanan manages to pack lines with beauty while simultaneously honing them to a sharp, succinct edge. Her work has sinew and muscle and yet extends an open hand.” —Tim McKee, director of publishing, North Atlantic Books
—Rachel Yoder, author of Nightbitch, editor of draft: the journal of practice
“Megan Buchanan finds the sacred in the everyday and offers poems as fierce evidence, each one ‘naked as a hot pancake.’ This collection reminds us that the inevitable heartbreaks of being a person can provoke a more vivid awareness of the world around us, so that we see ‘the kid/across the teeter-totter’ and witness the hummingbirds’ ‘last sips before flying back to cacti in bisbee.’ What could be more enviable than to be ‘entirely possessed/by an ordinary magic’?” —Matthew Burgess, PhD, author of Slippers for Elsewhere, Enormous Smallness: A Story of E. E. Cummings, Make Meatballs Sing: The Life and Art of Corita Kent, and Drawing on Walls: The Story of Keith Haring
“How fierce and resilient, what a tremendous and tender heart. Clothesline Religion is gorgeous, powerful. I was utterly enrapt, reading it out in the yard under the full sun. And transformed—the book inspired me to take my own daughter out of school for a road trip, time for just her and me. Mother and daughter.” —Robin MacArthur, Half Wild (PEN New England award winner) and Heart Spring Mountain
“Clothesline Religion offers each reader a chance to hang out in the opened air with the extraordinary Megan Buchanan. Each poem has a lived-in magic, longing transformed by candor, and candor, by music.” —Verandah Porche, author of Sudden Eden
“Megan Buchanan manages to pack lines with beauty while simultaneously honing them to a sharp, succinct edge. Her work has sinew and muscle and yet extends an open hand.” —Tim McKee, director of publishing, North Atlantic Books