The poems in Polly Buckingham's debut collection, The River People, move through both dream and natural landscapes exploring connection and loss, abundance and degradation, the personal and the political. The speaker in these poems is often in a state of not knowing that can be both terrifying and revelatory. It is a state in which windows and doors connect the living and the dead and the inner and outer worlds. Organized in four sections that move from Florida to the Pacific Northwest, the poems are heavily imagistic and reminiscent of deep image poetry and Spanish surrealism.