The score or so of poems collected in Katie Budris’ Mid-Bloom (2021) are all self-contained visions of life, whole and lovely within themselves, but together they form a meditation on loss and life that is more than the sum of its parts. Despite the grief and suffering of its material—Budris’ struggle with and survival of breast cancer, blended seamlessly with childhood memories of her own mother’s illness and death from lymphoma cancer—Mid-Bloom gifts its readers an exquisite sense of peace.
I was lucky enough to interview Budris a few weeks ago, and we spoke of the compressed nature of poetry being its greatest strength. This is evident throughout Mid-Bloom: most of the poems focus on small, very brief experiences—a moment looking out the window, or waiting for the subway, or sitting at the kitchen table—but they are perfect, photograph-like, and crisp. Budris has a remarkable ability to make us see just one moment incredibly vividly, and then she trusts us to deduce the rest, the waves of grief and love behind it all (and deduce we do—given that we read the whole book, which is why I recommend reading it straight through).
My favorite poem in the collection was a quiet gem titled “How to Survive a Blizzard,” about the cardinals in the author’s backyard: “As the wind wages war,/biting through skin and feathers…they know/the best protection from a blizzard is not/to fly, but to burrow.” The metaphor is clear—sometimes when you’re in the midst of suffering all you can do is hunker down and trust in your own ability to get through it—but what’s lovely is that the literal meaning is never lost: as much as the poem is about a woman’s battle with cancer, it’s about a woman battling cancer looking out her window at cardinals in a blizzard.
Another standout was “Chemotherapy, Day 17,” in which the narrator prepares to shave her head. It’s heartbreaking in its specificity, because its lack of universality is what makes it concrete. The key line describes the narrator’s husband comforting her: “We meet between the closets.” It’s a small detail but it anchors the poem firmly in reality—this was a real moment that took place in a real room—and it’s this that makes the rest of the poem so moving. With emotions too big to put into words, Budris selects seemingly irrelevant, tiny details to share, and we feel all the weight that’s behind them.
Budris’ humility is as compelling as her honesty. “Dawn Paddle,” about a canoeing trip, is a good example. When we spoke, Budris confessed to me that she didn’t think it really fit in the collection, but I disagree. It’s not directly related to cancer, but Mid-Bloom is about Budris’ life as a whole; and even when you’re dealing with illness, there will be other parts of life that ultimately are a part of that broader experience. How many poets have tried to describe the sunrise? But Budris succeeds (I won’t quote it here because I think the poem must be read in its entirety to do it justice) because she doesn’t try to do anything world-changing; she’s just describing her own experience one morning when she saw the sunrise. Again, it’s Budris’ very concreteness and groundedness that end up giving her poems their dreamy quality, and that make them ultimately affirming, despite their painful subjects. The message is that life needs no elaboration; it is beautiful enough.
Mid-Bloom
By Katie Budris
Finishing Line Press
Published in 2021
36 pages
Grace Fisher is a junior double-majoring in English and Dance. She enjoys writing literary analysis, argumentative essays, and poetry. Her favorite authors are Dorothy Dunnett, C.S. Lewis, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Dostoevsky.