Wild Strawberries

by Lee Busby

Lee Busby’s work has appeared in such journals as Fullosia Press, Poet’s Ink Review, Número Cinq, and the Moon City Review among others. He writes poems that are funny, sad, smart and always honest, exploring love, loss and the margins of masculinity. They echo with the voices and images of southwestern Missouri, but his poetry is much more than regional. Lee is the outsider looking in and the insider looking out, a glorious contradiction which resonates in his work.Richard Jackson described Lee’s poems this “Beginning with an escape and ending “not far from anywhere,” Lee Busby moves magically, almost imperceptibly from journey to odyssey as he explores family history and larger issues of loss and redemption, always wondering, as he does when fishing with his father that things might already have “slipped, / almost, away from me.” Hiding behind a kind of folksy vision, though, is a voice that is clever, almost Horatian in its slyness, as when he says to a girl, teaching her to fish, “I’ll slide  / in here behind you this time and show you / how to reel it in, nice and easy.” Indeed, it is just such a strategy that Horace would approve of, a kind of vision one would expect in the stories of Larry Brown. That Busby can pull off this delicate balance is a testament to a complex, honest vision that pulls us in with its unassuming airs only to immediately show us the falsity of our own assumptions and reveal a deep, mature vision of a life lived in endless self exploration.”Busby received his M.F.A. in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts in Montpelier, VT, and has spent his writing career working alongside such award-winning writers as Terrance Hayes, Marie Howe, David Wojahn and Richard Jackson. He received his M.A. in Creative Writing at Missouri State University where he also taught in their Creative Writing program for three years. He has published numerous poems and won an award for best poem in the 2008 issue of Moon City Review. Wild Strawberries is Lee's first chapbook.

24 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2012