Books
2025 Inaugural VersoFrontera Winner
Available Nov. 2025 via Texas Review Press
Unburying the Bones is an unapologetic and powerful collection of poems that traces the ever-present grief that lingers in the body—in the bone marrow. These poems stir memory, bloodline, and womanhood into fires that burn down toxic inheritances passed down through rituals and silence. With language that pulses close to the earth, this collection explores how identity, survival, and love are carried in a woman’s body so as to reclaim and celebrate sex as pleasure and the body as home. These poems enter the wreckage with a hunger for revenge, but it is a call for justice that illuminates the page. Their varying forms and precise lyricism remind us of what poetry can do and reimagine new ways to syntax experience.
Praise
In her debut poetry collection, Unburying the Bones, Victoria Buitron dresses untamed desire with the body of a broken marriage, gives it hair, sex, and crowns it with childlessness, all this as a quiet, lyrical rage traces the history of the everyday violence bruising the lives of countless women. She asks: “How can I heal if my mother only taught me to reside in the place between praying and wishing?” And it is precisely this “place between praying and wishing” that Buitron sets on fire, this place of false security, false comfort, false patriarchal narrative. By the light of this fire, these poems call us to birth a “new skin” and to love ourselves again “when no one sees.” Read these poems and bear witness to the courageous act of reclaiming one’s life.
—Octavio Quintanilla, Series Editor, VersoFrontera Poetry Series & author of The Book of Wounded Sparrows (Texas Review Press) & Las Horas Imposibles / The Impossible Hours (University of Arizona Press).
When a mother bear asked, How do you do it?… Live with Men, Victoria Buitron’s bearing reply is a manifesto of poesy that unveils her quest to recapture the unquiet of womanhood, every man must read. Unburying the Bones is an excavation of matriarchy digging to rediscover the sacrosanct of self. The collection disentangles the complexities of patriarchy, sexuality, marriage and esteem to unfurl (while inhaling the dulcet of palo santo) that healing is like roots from a tree seeking out water. Who amongst us doesn’t need water?
—Frederick-Douglass Knowles II, Hartford Poet Laureate Emeritus and author of Sinking in Moonlight Alone
Victoria Buitron aims to teach us what we already know, deep down: there are one thousand ways to come home, but we spend most of our lives on a pilgrimage back to ourselves at our most alive and various. Her debut poetry collection Unburying the Bones reads as a field guide to the natural world—inclusive of the body and of the creature world that consoles it. Let it be the antidote to all that would bury us.
—Carol Ann Davis, author of Songbird (Wesleyan University Press, 2026)
Unburying the Bones is unrelenting and astonishing. These poems overflow—erupt!—with passion and expression, a dynamism of form and sound and theme from howl to whisper, from betrayal, desire, and revenge to recognition and reclamation: of female pleasure and agency, of kinship with the more-than-human—from deer and jay to the Milky Way—and ultimately of a body whole: tender skin, suckling blood, and bones, too, which the poet reminds us can grow outside our bodies, too. These poems will change you.
—Ana Maria Spagna, author of Pushed (Torrey House Press)
A Body Across Two Hemispheres
Winner of the Fairfield Book Prize
When Victoria Buitron turns fifteen, the life she knows and the place she calls home comes to an abrupt halt. Her paternal grandfather becomes ill, and her parents decide to become repatriates out of a sense of duty and love—leaving their cars, house, and jobs as a nanny and a garbage man in Connecticut for the coast of Ecuador with their children. In A Body Across Two Hemispheres, Victoria foregoes a chronological account of how this decision severs her family, and instead uses powerful essays and a structure based on location to narrate how she evolves from a brokenhearted teenage girl to a woman who finds her way home.
Praise
“A Body Across Two Hemispheres is a timely book, one many of us need and will be grateful to have read. Never shying from what is difficult to reconcile, A Body Across Two Hemispheres introduces an utterly engaging, assured new voice in nonfiction. In her memoir-in-essays, Buitron lays bare various forms of grief but presents them with equal measures of resilience. She posits love—ultimately—as the curative for loss.”
—Shara McCallum, 2021 Fairfield Book Prize Judge and author of No Ruined Stone and The Face of Water
With virtuosic descriptive skill and essays that span generations and hemispheres, Victoria Buitron has crafted a memoir that pushes the very limits of the medium, looking at what trauma writes in the story of a life–and the palimpsests that can be made after. Of family as a continuous act, a choice. Of love that defies state injustice and separation of time and place. These essays are groundbreaking, vital, revelatory.
—Liza Olson, author of Here’s Waldo and The Brother We Share, Editor-in-Chief of (mac)ro(mic).