“Yearning is at the heart of Unbuckled, the sensory drive that keeps us engaged with the world. David Meischen gazes out upon the desert and beyond, noting both repetition and inevitable change, with wisdom and generosity. Landscape, memory, popular culture, and classical art mirror and replicate like ghost selves in these poems as the past and present engage in conversation that creates an expansive acceptance and universal, if tempered, understanding.”

– James Cihlar, author of The Shadowgraph: Poems

“Unbuckled bursts with gorgeous, playful, musical language in poems that traverses the spectrum of wistful, lustful, physical, all the way to contemplative, observant, and edged at times with sorrow. These are poems that celebrate desire and youth and longing but also acknowledge an aging body and the yearning for more time to inhabit that body; still, there is nothing of regret here. Sensuous and precise, these are love poems to sexuality and to memory, to living and to having lived well. Meischen’s dexterity with form makes this agile collection a series of discovery and surprise as poems move smoothly between registers of joy and sensuality, contemplation, and tenderness. This wildly beautiful book is dazzling, page after page.”

– Rebecca Aronson, author of Anchor

“These are not nostalgic poems. These are atmospheric poems, externalized studies on interior storms. That particular barometric shift upon the exchanging of gazes. The absolute airlock of loneliness. Every inclement whether. There is no easy sentimentality here; all past pain is still pertinent, still felt. But if these are poems of grief, then they are also poems of grace. David Meischen’s poetry bears both with a native lyricism and the absolute inability to write anything that isn’t guttingly, gorgeously precise.”

– Jill Alexander Essbaum, author of Would-Land

“The world of David Meischen’s Unbuckled is a world of specificity. The poems in this book are constructed in striking detail: ‘swimmers drenched and glimmering,’ the ‘sharp-hooked beak’ of a hawk, the ‘bright tremor of altar bells.’ And in all its specificity there is also a companion hunger, for the past, for love, for connection. A hunger so strong that the blank space in these poems, which the poet uses masterfully, becomes something that the reader easily interprets. The blank space becomes the meadow, the American sky, a city, a lost lover. This book is a full and complex world. The real world.”

– Gustavo Hernandez, author of Bachelor

“A masterclass in the poetry of remembrance, Unbuckled navigates the quiet hallways of the past, mapping the spaces left behind by departed lovers, family, and friends. These are poems written in the twilight—spare yet muscular, less about the shock of loss and more about its enduring presence. Not merely laments, they are acts of reclamation. Even grief, Meischen reminds us, marks us with life’s fierce and stubborn vitality.”

– Bruce Snider, author of Blood Harmony