Poetry. In THE BLOODY PLANET, Callista Buchen calls out to the geographies of the solar system, considering the local and the grand, the Earth-bound and beyond.

Her speakers are searchers--through far-flung examinations and pursuits of strange landscapes, they bring us face to face with what it means to be human. On Mercury, 'Scars gather flesh-- / fall apart. The ground writes, rewrites.' The speaker asks again and again: 'What does it matter?'

What matters is the gravity of place. What matters is what pulls us. In these twenty gorgeous, tensile poems, Buchen explores what connects and separates, culling from the planets a universe of language, color, work, art, even love.

"In THE BLOODY PLANET, Callista Buchen takes us on a breathtaking tour of the solar system, detailing the violent surfaces and inhospitable climates of each planet and leaving us in humble awe of our own. From Mercury's hot, unstable mantle to Mars's angry red dust to planet Uranus's bitter cold, Buchen stands in wonder of these planets, where 'giant spots maul whole / levels of world and swallow / themselves the dust afterwards.' In these tightly crafted poems, Buchen wisely looks beyond Earth to draw our attention to Earth, issuing a bold and urgent warning for a world on the brink of its own demise: 'See this, machine of humanity,' she writes. 'Dust only multiplies. You are marching. You are a lion. You are / THE BLOODY PLANET. You are painted red, a shrieking mouth.' Buchen's poems are significant, vital--as gorgeous and unstoppable as the alien storms they describe."--Alyse Knorr

"Callista Buchen's poetic impulse, a deep-felt mission to capture the quintessence of our solar system, is far from usual. Her aim, not to anthropomorphize, nor to reduce to metaphor those spinning emblems of childhood-learning, is rather