You will find the work within real, one perfect image/moment, image/moment until even the most dry-eyed among us will find themselves reading through pools of tears, and yet, not wanting to stop, hungry too, for the raw and real life that lives within these pages. Stellasue Lee, Ph. D., Author, Editor, Teacher The Buddha Knot begins in a climate of war and ends at peace, but not without taking us through a battleground of love, death, and the slow erosion of all we cannot keep. McManus’s amazing collection imparts soft wounds with its haunting language plucked from the eye of the storm. Be prepared to breathe in these words and to see more clearly. Lenore Weiss, author of The Golem

Reading The Buddha Knot, I’m reminded again of where poetry should lead us: To Wisdom, that most painful of virtues. In stunning poems that read like an Apologia Pro Vita Sua, McManus looks back with a tender, elegiac eye at a life paved with loss and discovery, the lingering trauma of Vietnam, the death of a brother in childhood, and those enlightening moments of aloneness earned beneath the starred skies of Appalachia and the Louisiana Delta. You’ll read these courageous poems and reflect, and then read them again. Jack Heflin Author of The Map of Leaving: Poems, and Local Hope