Annie Breitenbucher • Fortune

Fortune, is a collection of poetry and digital images, published by the Laurel Poetry Collective in 2007.
It is Annie’s first book.

About Fortune

“... Annie Breitenbucher’s unsparing look at the honorable battle against the forces of depression, her portraits of family loves, her willingness to celebrate human souls who have touched her human soul — all of this, and so much more shines off Fortune's pages. Beyond all the beauty in her language, the integrity of the narrator's visions, there are her remarkable photos and photo collages, guiding our eyes and thoughts to other realms. All reviewers will say it, but I choose to say it too: it is our good fortune that this book has found its way into our world. Read it, and you will understand why.”

— Deborah Keenan, author of Willow Room, Green Door: New and Selected Poems (Milkweed Editions)

About Annie

Annie Breitenbucher is a freelance writer living in Minneapolis; her stories have previously appeared in the Minneapolis Star Tribune newspaper, where she worked for 23 years. She was awarded a Master of Liberal Studies degree, with an emphasis in poetry and digital imaging, from the University of Minnesota in 2005.

Urgency

Tonight the breeze is just so.

It stirs the ashes

in the bowl of my heart, just

so I know you are there. You

all of you, who are love

returned to dust.

All day it has been this way.

The sun shining just so.

This restless stirring

to know I am here. Me,

all of me, becoming love

before dust.

From Fortune,by Annie Breitenbucher

Annie on Writing Poetry

For me, written words represent a “calling” — because the act of putting them together demands that I be alive and attentive to the world, that I be willing to grow, and that I be open to the experience of God and the presence of small miracles . . . And, as a writer, one of the greatest of the small miracles is finding a combination of words that have meaning to a reader.

From The Double Meaning of Yield: Laurel Poets on Writing Poetry