"Buffy Aakaash's poems are heart-rich and earth-rich and time-rich. The cycles of the natural world parallel the cycles of loss and love experienced by the speaker. Love turns into loss, winter transforms into spring. Aakaash tracks and makes visible the rise and fall of intimacy between lovers and among family in language that is luminous and precise. Rooted in the chaos and breakthroughs of middle age, these poems enact how attentiveness to others and to the world can nourish and alter the soul, the body. These poems are ambitious and rich with unpredictable imagery and hard-won insight."

—EDUARDO C. CORRAL, author of Slow Lightning and Guillotine

​

"Buffy Aakaash's debut collection is a host of tender moments, passion flowing, longing, and starting over. With an opening quote explaining fractals, this book gives us the chaos of loss, love, and the gods of nature and place, as in his poem 'Toads'-'ears perk / to seductive songs'; and in 'One Tennessee Summer'-'whippoorwill shamans sing this life into being"

—JULENE TRIPP WEAVER, author of Slow Now with Clear Skies

​

"These lyrical and courageous poems ask each of us 'Who am I in all of this? / Who will I be in all of that?' Showered with empathy and alive with details, Breaking explores the boundaries of what sustains us in times of loss. These are poems of beginnings and reclamations, at once tender and tough and joyful."

—RAY HUDSON, author of Moments Rightly Placed: An Aleutian Memoir

​

"Covering a range of human experience from conception to death, and love to loss, and the landscapes of both fractals and arroyos, these poems are evocative in both imagery and in emotion, yet without dripping into mere sentimentality."

—MATTHEW DICKERSON, author of The Voices of Rivers and Birds in the Sky, Fish in the Sea