Buddha Box

$14.00 paper | 67 Pages
ISBN: 978-1-930974-42-5
Publication Date: April 2004
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Winner of the 2003 Green Rose Prize

“As subversive in its simplicity as any truly American Buddhism, or as any truly feminine anything, the poetry in Buddha Box is both radical and beautiful; both unflinching and consoling . . . Gretchen Mattox is absolutely original in her strategy of bringing Zen mind to the down-and-out human landscape of West Los Angeles. Her resulting discoveries are quite often simply brilliant. Buddha Box is filled with light.”
—Gail Wronsky

“‘All fire, ready to take and not worry if it offends,’ writes Gretchen Mattox in this Zen-supple, hungrily-burning collection of poems. This is LA, this is the Buddha Box, these are the lineaments of joy and detachment set, raging jewel in lotus, before us. Pink skies, astral bodies, saguaros, gas stations, love, grief—all the desperate and divine details appear in order to disappear, as they are masterfully chanted in this extraordinary voice.”
—Carol Muske-Dukes

Gretchen Mattox

Gretchen Mattox has been a fellow at the Edward Albee Foundation, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Yaddo, as well as an instructor at The New School for Social Research, Antioch University, and Loyola Marymount University. She has lived in numerous places, including Denver, Provincetown, and New York City, and currently resides in Santa Monica, California. Her third poetry collection, The Flower Compass Sutras, is forthcoming. gretchenmattox.net