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Poetry, chapbook, 36 pages, from Bottlecap Features.
A life spent creating suggests a way of being, a way of moving through life, a way of seeing. In W/Make, Corbett Buchly explores where those impulses come from and how they are manifested, and what it means to be a maker. We uncover some of his beginnings in poems like “voice like linen” and “birthday,” wherein a teacher “unlocked the symbols secreted in story” and “language’s gate swung open.” Buchly has been a maker from a young age, his creative impulses going beyond language projects, whether he’s creating a new board game or concocting a batch of cold-processed soap.
In W/Make, Buchly investigates the nature of art itself in poems like “the film” and the other-worldly “I am another’s dream.” And in poems like the absurd “the line abused” or the humorous “do not rent to poets,” he examines the various ways we find of creating.
This is poetry both accessible and surreal. Buchly speaks to us equally in the physical, the visceral, and the metaphysical. He writes, “if lucky we are shocked to life/a dozen times, crying out/stung awake by discovery.” If you’re a maker too, this collection is sure to resonate. And when you’re through with it, you might just feel as if you’d “crawl[ed] from the confines...as if [you] had been dreaming.”
As early as age six, Corbett Buchly began playing with language, telling stories, and making new things, a pattern of behavior he has yet to grow out of. He is an alumnus of Texas Christian University and the professional writing program at the University of Southern California. He has published poems in journals such as Barrow Street, Dream Catcher, The Interpreter’s House, North Dakota Quarterly, Plainsongs, Rio Grande Review, SLAB, and the Poetry Society of Texas’s 2024, 2025, and 2026 Books of the Year. His manuscript Roots Through Stone won second place in the Poetry Society of Texas’s 2025 Catherine Case Lubbe Manuscript Contest, and his chapbook Interstellar Catalog of Human Objects received an honorable mention from Concrete Wolf. He lives in Northeast Texas with his wife and two fabulous sons.