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Invisible Violets: A Mixtape in Lyric Essays
Winner of the Wandering Aengus Press Book Award in Nonfiction
Chrys Buckley was born with albinism, which means she has no pigment and she is legally blind. From an early age, she realized that while she was the blind one, it was hard for other people to see her as a real person.
Chrys often felt like a blank white canvas that everyone painted their assumptions about disability and paleness onto, rendering her invisible.
With warmth, compassion, wit, and lyricism, Chrys examines albinism, disability, blindness, synesthesia, dysfunctional relationships, self-betrayal, true-crime pop culture and true crimes on the smaller stage of our real lives, discrimination in medical education, and the power of words and writing.
This literary mixtape is an exploration of seeing, not seeing, being seen, and not being seen. It's a reclaiming of the real, particular self that too often gets overlooked and obscured by tropes and projections. Each essay is a love to place, to memory, to music across decades, to books, to science and medicine, to the land and the sea and the sky. Underscoring all the stories and contemplations is the steel will of a writer screaming in vivid color to make her flawed individual heart visible.
Chrys Buckley was born with albinism, which means she has no pigment and she is legally blind. From an early age, she realized that while she was the blind one, it was hard for other people to see her as a real person.
Chrys often felt like a blank white canvas that everyone painted their assumptions about disability and paleness onto, rendering her invisible.
With warmth, compassion, wit, and lyricism, Chrys examines albinism, disability, blindness, synesthesia, dysfunctional relationships, self-betrayal, true-crime pop culture and true crimes on the smaller stage of our real lives, discrimination in medical education, and the power of words and writing.
This literary mixtape is an exploration of seeing, not seeing, being seen, and not being seen. It's a reclaiming of the real, particular self that too often gets overlooked and obscured by tropes and projections. Each essay is a love to place, to memory, to music across decades, to books, to science and medicine, to the land and the sea and the sky. Underscoring all the stories and contemplations is the steel will of a writer screaming in vivid color to make her flawed individual heart visible.
228 pages, Paperback
Published March 13, 2026
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
April 9, 2026
In Invisible Violets, a Mixtape in Lyric Essays, Buckley creates Essays, canvases onto which Buckley can paint with words in a way to get across the experiences Buckley has lived as someone with Albinism, and how that Albinism affects her sight. Buckley is legally blind, but maintains some sense of vision, and that's the uniqueness of this book in a nutshell, unexpected in the ways her heart shines through these labors of love. The reader walks away a changed person, more attuned to the world, especially in regards to vision, and how we see.
April 10, 2026
Wow. This book is poetry. More people need to read it!
August 25, 2026
Stunning collection of identity prose. This is a love letter to the 90s and has such haunting, lovely imagery.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews