Mid-Bloom

by Katie Budris

Mid-Bloom is one woman's exploration of grief, illness, and survival as she faces a breast cancer diagnosis. Having lost her mother to cancer two decades prior, author Katie Budris is forced to confront that loss again as her own treatment unearths a deep longing to connect with her late mother. Through a loosely chronological structure, these poems invoke nostalgia through childhood memories and use nature-centered imagery to guide the reader through some of her most difficult experiences. Described by Abbey J. Porter of Mad Poets Society as "accessible poems... with a quiet ferocity," Budris taps into the difficult realities of adulthood and mortality we all must face.

36 pages, Paperback

First published August 13, 2021

About the author

Born and raised in the Chicagoland area, Katie Budris completed her undergraduate work at Hope College in Holland, Michigan and earned her MFA at Roosevelt University in Chicago. Her poems have appeared in journals such as The Albion Review, After Hours Press, From the Depths (Haunted Waters Press), The Kelsey Review, Michigan Avenue Review, Outside In Magazine, Temenos, Yellow Medicine Review, and the anthology Crossing Lines (Main Rag Press). She is at work on her first full-length collection of poetry, The Length of Distance, centered on the physical and emotional distances in relationships. Katie lives in Philadelphia where she is a professor of Writing Arts at Rowan University in Glassboro, New Jersey and at Community College of Philadelphia. She also serves as Editor-in-Chief of Glassworks Magazine.

Reviews

[Dawn Colangelo Leas · Rating 5 out of 5]

With imagery that ignites the imagination and memories that map the mud and muck of loss,
grief, and illness, Mid-Bloom takes its readers on a journey in and through, to and from the past
and present until the two coalesce in a moment of understanding as a daughter fights cancer
two decades after she loses her mother to it. Budris questions her green thumb in several
poems, but I hope she doesn’t doubt her poetic prowess. She nimbly wields her pen poem after
poem to breathe life into a collection that isn’t “mid-bloom,” but one that is beautifully and
heartachingly in full-bloom.
-Dawn Leas, author of A Person Worth Knowing, Take Something When You Go, and I Know
When to Keep Quiet