Unburying the Bones is a book of poetry that serves as an ode to those with grief lingering in their bodies, latent or bubbling-but always present-either in the firm of their ribcage or the soft of their thighs. The poems bring to the fore pain made corporeal, the roots of misogyny, femicide, and the depths of matrilineality. It is an exploration of intimacy while reflecting on the lengths society has gone to subdue women. The writer reclaims sex as pleasure, her body as home, and her fear into drive.
Victoria Buitron is a writer who hails from Ecuador and resides in Connecticut. She received an MFA in creative writing from Fairfield University. She is currently the competitions editor for Harbor Review. Her debut memoir-in-essays, A Body Across Two Hemispheres (Woodhall Press, 2022), was the 2021 Fairfield Book Prize winner. In 2023, she received the Artistic Excellence Award from the Connecticut Office of the Arts, which also receives federal funding. She has been the series editor for the Connecticut Literary Anthology since 2023. Craigardan, Tin House, GrubStreet, Sundress Publications, VONA, and more organizations have championed her work through grants or writing residencies. Unburying the Bones is her debut poetry collection.
Unburying the Bones is unrelenting and astonishing. These poems overflow--erupt!--with passion and expression, a dynamism of form and sound and theme from howl to whisper, from betrayal, desire, and revenge to recognition and reclamation: of female pleasure and agency, of kinship with the more-than-human--from deer and jay to the Milky Way--and ultimately of a body whole: tender skin, suckling blood, and bones, too, which the poet reminds us can grow outside our bodies, too. These poems will change you. --Ana Maria Spagna, author of Mile Marker Six--Ana Maria Spagna In her debut poetry collection, Unburying the Bones, Victoria Buitron dresses untamed desire with the body of a broken marriage, gives it hair, sex, and crowns it with childlessness, all this as a quiet, lyrical rage traces the history of the everyday violence bruising the lives of countless women. She asks: "How can I heal if my mother only taught me to reside in the place between praying and wishing?" And it is precisely this "place between praying and wishing" that Buitron sets on fire, this place of false security, false comfort, false patriarchal narrative. By the light of this fire, these poems call us to birth a "new skin" and to love ourselves again "when no one sees." Read these poems and bear witness to the courageous act of reclaiming one's life. --Octavio Quintanilla, VersoFrontera Series Editor and author of The Book of Wounded Sparrows and Las Horas Imposibles / The Impossible Hours--Octavio Quintanilla Victoria Buitron aims to teach us what we already know, deep down: there are one thousand ways to come home, but we spend most of our lives on a pilgrimage back to ourselves at our most alive and various. Her debut poetry collection Unburying the Bones reads as a field guide to the natural world--inclusive of the body and of the creature world that consoles it. Let it be the antidote to all that would bury us. --Carol Ann Davis, author of Songbird--Carol Ann Davis When a mother bear asked, How do you do it?... Live with Men, Victoria Buitron's bearing reply is a manifesto of poesy that unveils her quest to recapture the unquiet of womanhood, every man must read. Unburying the Bones is an excavation of matriarchy digging to rediscover the sacrosanct of self. The collection disentangles the complexities of patriarchy, sexuality, marriage and esteem to unfurl (while inhaling the dulcet of palo santo) that healing is like roots from a tree seeking out water. Who amongst us doesn't need water? --Frederick-Douglass Knowles II, Hartford Poet Laureate Emeritus and author of Sinking in Moonlight Alone--Frederick-Douglass Knowles II
