Join award winning authors & educators, Alexander Shalom Joseph and Andrew Schelling, as they celebrate Alexander’s latest poetry collection from Middle Creek Publishing, Buffalo Elegies.

The cover image of Buffalo Elegies shows a bracketed blank space [___] projected over an obscured image of the plains. Within the book itself, [___] was substituted for “Buffalo” each time the word appeared in a poem. This was done because this hard cover, special edition collection is a series of 23 elegies about the eradication of the Buffalo from the American West, the massacre which took the population of the great herd from 60 million to a mere 23. [___] exemplifies the space left in their absence, the impossibility of speaking to this animal without naming its loss, and the emptiness of the West without their feral thunder.

In a show of continued support for the twenty three who survived, $1 from the sale of this book, will go to the Buffalo Field Campaign, a non-profit dedicated to caretaking the descends of the last wild herd. 

More About the Book:
In Buffalo Elegies, Alexander Shalom Joseph confronts one of North America's greatest ecological tragedies through a series of powerful, deeply humane poems that mourn the near extinction of the American Buffalo while exploring the enduring consequences of colonization, environmental destruction, and cultural amnesia. These poems move between personal reflection and historical witness, revealing that the empty plains and mountain vistas we celebrate today are also places haunted by profound absence.

About Alexander Shalom Joseph:

Alexander Shalom Joseph, MFA, MA, is an award winning existentialist, animist and nature focused author of seven published books spanning poetry and fiction. He teaches writing in universities, libraries, museums, hiking trails, schools and prisons across the Colorado Front Range.

About Andrew Schelling:

Andrew Schelling has been a long-time teacher of poetry and Sanskrit language at Naropa University. He lives in the “middle mountains” below the Indian Peaks and has published twenty-odd books. Poetry, translation, essays, anthologies. Mountains, Zen, animal tracks, Asian poetry. Recent poetry book is Forests, Temples, Glacial Rivers (Empty Bowl, 2025).