Smolder
June 22, 2026 | Ex Ophidia Press | 979–9–885711–90–2
Smolder takes its title from a diagnosis the author’s husband received two decades ago, of smoldering multiple myeloma—a treatable but incurable blood cancer. At the time, in this early stage of illness, the prescribed treatment was to watch and wait for myeloma to cause problems. Plucked from the natural world and placed among arid clinical terms and bewildering medical advice, this lush word—smolder—sparks a collection of poems about the many kinds of fire blazing inside a life. Fires of grief, lust, loss, rage, uncertainty and acceptance. The poems in Smolder are about tending to aliveness. They’re love poems elegies, prayers, howls, meditations. Together, they illuminate what it means to live with the open flame of a tender heart.
Praise & Reviews
Winner of the 2025 Richard-Gabriel Rummonds Poetry Contest
“In Smolder, the lens of being witness to what the beloved must endure shows a world simultaneously abundant with tenderness, lucency, emptiness, hopeful math, acheful grief, bald ibis, flammable trees, orcas, desire to be ‘body to body,’ doctor visits, what one would give up, and the intertwining existence of the more-than-human world as a respite to the chatter of the mind, of the ‘restless whole.'”
— Felicia Zamora, 2025 judge and author of Interstitial Archaeology
“Written with a serious and intelligent candor, about those things we struggle with most deeply, while exploring the burdens of consciousness with dignity and unrelenting grace, these poems are not simply testimonies but real testaments to the best of who and what we can be. I am grateful for having read these poems.”
— Bruce Weigl, author of Apostle of Desire
“In this collection, Busch calls for us to inquire into presence, to turn toward the space ‘between before and after,’ even when this here & now is hard. Yet, when faced with discomfort, Busch’s speaker & other voices don’t turn away; they choose to appreciate each opportunity to feel their aliveness. Upon reading this collection, we get to do the same & ‘say, I’m just so grateful.'”
— Emily Hyland, author of My Wise Little Ghost
“Smolder is a book of illnesses, desires, painful might-have-beens, struggles to conceive, excruciating waiting, and also of the luck that makes us feel and binds us one to another, and of the miracle of living, full stop. Read these poems and you too may feel aware of the fragile, improbable miracle—your bounded time; your own muddled love and desire; that something in these ‘defies extinction.’ Smolder burns with a great deal of incandescent light.”
— Tess Taylor, author of Rift Zone
“’Cherish everything’ may seem like simple advice, yet the tender, clear-sighted poems in Smolder demonstrate how true and necessary that advice is. On every astonishing page, Busch interrogates what it means to be consumed—by illness, by grief, by uncertainty—as well as to be sustained by the beauty of the natural world and our relationships. The answers offered are hard-won, beautifully rendered, and above all, necessary.”
— Carrie Shipers, author of Grief Land