Oh, this book. With gritty intimacy, cinematic poetics, and clear-eyed devotion, Paige Buffington transports us through memory and dream to a place where time might be told by the migration of cranes. Buffington explores not only what is home, but who is our home? Who leaves? Who returns? And how do we carry home with us wherever we are, marked forever by its wounds, its gifts, its landscapes, its heartbreaks, its language, its traditions, its love. So quietly, so surely, Halchita Red transported me.
-Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, author of The Unfolding and host of The Poetic Path
Remember, these story-poems insist. "Remember being thrown in morning snow, boiling water over fire." In such memories of Navajo traditions, with fierce intimacy, these poems weave imagery of ruptures, trauma, and tenderness, a tapestry of beauty where everything is included, where memory is alive, where the land and culture and family trace a line home. These are poems to remember the medicine of poetry. What a gift Paige Buffington offer us.
-Anne Haven McDonnell, author of Breath on a Coal
In Halchita Red, Buffington offers a text-or rather, a voice-a sepia light, a visceral reminder of what has survived with its beauty intact, despite what 400 years of colonization continues to attempt to disappear. Halchita Red acts as a reliquary of words and stories finding their way home, cinematically-expressed sentiments-simultaneously gorgeous and gritty-spinning a multi-generational Native narrative of loss, grief, heartbreak, hope, and beauty, reminding us that we should "repeat the words like cedar and meadow, cicada." Remember grandmother's spirited advice, "be careful, but keep going.
-David Anthony Martin, author of The Ground Nest, Founder and Editor Middle Creek Publishing & Audio
In these poems a reader can get lost, a process happily encouraged by Buffington's frequent use of second person pronouns. We are there. We taste the wind. We smell the sagebrush. We feel our fingers sticking to the table of a midnight diner. Buffington sucks us into this narrative and does not let us go.
-Marissa Harwood, Reviewer, Rocky Mountain Reader.
Paige Buffington's poetry is storyteller, and like all good storytellers it teaches us to pay attention, to see what is going on around the shining story. Poets are seers trained to see "the foamy backbone of rain." They remind us not to get stunned by the glare of the story because "shiny things make us crazy." We humans are easily overwhelmed, but Buffington leads us safely through.
-James Thomas Stevens (Aronhi ta's) author of Combing the Snakes from His Hair, and others
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Paige Buffington is Navajo, of the Naashashi (Bear Clan), born for the Biligaanaa (White People). Her grandparent clans are Ashiihi (Salt) and Biligaanaa. Her family is originally from Tohatchi N.M., a town sitting at the base of the Chuska Mountains in Navajoland. She received an MFA in poetry from the Institute of American Indian Arts in 2015. Hashtags accompanying her poems have included "American West," "memory," "family," and "desert Southwest." Her poems can be found in The Dine Reader, Narrative Magazine, Honey Literary, and Contra Viento, among others. Her poem "From 20 Miles Outside of Gallup, Holbrook, Winslow, Farmington, or Albuquerque" was awarded the 2023 Zocalo Public Square Poetry Prize. Her essay, "What Are You Looking For?" was selected as a finalist for the 2024 Waterston Desert Writing Prize. Her essay, "Restless" was named the winner of Prism International's Creative Nonfiction Contest. She currently lives in Gallup, N.M. She teaches Kindergarten near the Rock Springs, Yatahey, and China Springs communities on the Navajo Nations.