Paula Closson Buck is the author of two books of poems, The Acquiescent Villa (1998) and Litanies Near Water (2008), both from Louisiana State University Press. She has published poems in such journals as Agni, Denver Quarterly, Gettysburg Review, Shenandoah, and Southern Review and has earned three individual artist fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. She has completed a first novel and is at work on a second, as well as on a book-length memoir. In addition to teaching at Bucknell University as professor of English, for eleven years she edited West Branch, the nationally distributed literary magazine published out of Bucknell's Stadler Center for Poetry.

Offering metaphor as prayer and arising in the humble revolutions available in the given moment, Paula Closson Buck's poems give us a world animated by the protean couplings of Power and Beauty, a world that is gorgeous and cruel, burgeoning and damaged, back-lit by war, by large-scale and “smaller” personal sufferings. These are splendid poems that have wit, tact, precision, heart, and a blessed clarity.
—Margaret Gibson on Litanies Near Water