Unburying the Bones: Author Victoria Buitron on Poetry & Community
By Adrian Frandle
On a bright Saturday in Fairfield, a graveyard limned the view outside the cafe’s window, like so many of our public spaces here in New England. It was an apt location to meet Victoria Buitron, a local poet and essayist, to discuss her first poetry collection, Unburying the Bones. The book is forthcoming from Texas Review Press as part of the Verso Frontera Literary and Arts Festival. Buitron said, “My book deals with hard topics; misogyny, femicide, domestic violence. Those things go along with the title Unburying the Bones because this was me on my knees, unburying my life.” Over chai lattes and mint tea, she discussed with me how she developed the book, where she finds poetry around her, and how the local community is essential to her writing practice.
We first met about four years ago over Zoom, as so many of us did in the quarantine era. We read together for Marvelous Verses, an anthology of superhero-related poetry. Buitron’s poem “Natasha Romanoff Died Because She Had No Kids or Spouse” from the anthology is a searing send up of the popular Marvel character Black Widow, and the burdens female superheroes are depicted as carrying: childbirth, self-sacrifice, sex appeal, all while cracking jokes.
She would continue to think deeply and compassionately about these themes of violence against women, and society’s expectations that they grin and bear it. In 2022 she published a memoir, A Body Across Two Hemispheres: A Memoir In Essays, which won the 2021 Fairfield Book Prize. The memoir details her experience growing up between Ecuador and the United States, and the difficulties of depression, family histories, and learning two languages. Her story is recounted with tenderness and honesty. Shortly after the high of publishing her debut book, a series of circumstances would turn everything upside down.
Divorce, death, depression. Life seems to stack troubles just when we think everything is going our way. Buitron experienced all this in the last few years, but faced it with sober bravery. Despite the lows, she remained determined and optimistic, a self-described “weekend warrior,” she devoted her free time to working on poetry both to document her experience, and also to find solace in community. Sipping chai as morning light streamed through the cafe window, she said “I knew this book had to be poetry because of the circumstances of my life…the structure of poetry allows so much freedom.”
Buitron finds poetry everywhere in her everyday life; in the plants she cares for and how they move themselves throughout the day to find the sun, in light that falls just-so on architecture, in the simple kindnesses people show. All this contributed to the poems in Unburying The Bones. An entire spectrum of emotions and experience built up to every line on every page. She discussed using a variety of forms and styles to plumb the joys and hardships of her life, but also to connect to larger issues of gender and power. She said, “I had to focus on other women’s stories…in honor of missing and murdered women, it was important for me to focus on these topics and dig deep.”
She praised the generosity she received from those around her, which allowed her to do the difficult work of excavation for the book. Friends and colleagues opened their homes to provide her safe writing space, and organizations granted her retreat time to write freely. “Without community, this book would not have been possible.” Over the past few years I have witnessed her generosity, first-hand. Her commitment to community is evident in her editing efforts with The Connecticut Literary Anthology, and the local writing workshops she hosts for fellow writers. Buitron lifts a light for others, knowing how vital it was for her during a dark, difficult time.
When I asked her, “If poetry were a color, what would it be?”, Buitron paused briefly and then called up a photo on her phone: a dazzling dress of shimmery rainbow ombre, like a prism come to life. As if the world were providing a rhyme to the image, a group of young cheerleaders, fresh out of practice, skipped by the cafe window, their rainbow sequins glimmering, their laughter, which seemed made of glitter, carried on the wind outside, up and over the graveyard behind us.
Victoria Buitron is a writer who hails from Ecuador and resides in Connecticut. She received an MFA in creative writing from Fairfield University. Her debut memoir-in-essays, A Body Across Two Hemispheres (Woodhall Press), was the 2021 Fairfield Book Prize winner. In 2023, she received the Artistic Excellence Award from the Connecticut Office of the Arts, which also receives federal funding. She has been the series editor for the Connecticut Literary Anthology since 2023. Craigardan, Tin House, GrubStreet, Sundress Publications, VONA and more organizations have championed her work through grants or writing residencies. Her debut poetry collection, Unburying the Bones, is 2025’s VersoFrontera inaugural prize winner and will be published by Texas Review Press.
Editor’s Note: Be sure to click on “Natasha Romanoff Died Because She Had No Kids Or Spouse” to read Victoria’s poem.
