Bonnie Buckley Maldonado

The Secret Lives of Us Kids: a Childhood Memoir 1941-1945 Bonnie Buckley Maldonado

Nobody could accuse Bonnie Buckley Maldonado or her brothers of having an easy childhood. For her latest book Maldonado draws on her award-winning poetry to reconstruct a childhood fraught with uncertainty and difficulty on the northern Montana oilfields. The first poet laureate of Silver City and Grant County, New Mexico, Maldonado uses her verses to invite readers into her family's small shack where they survived some of America's most dire times. Fifteen black-and-white photographs show a happy, smiling family, and few seem to know of their pain. Evicted from the family ranch during the Depression, the Buckleys make a hard living tending the oilfield. Between their father's drinking and their mother's suicide threats, the four children struggle to keep the family going when their parents cannot. Written in collaboration with Maldonado's older brother Patrick F. Buckley, the book's fifty poems tell of finding love and hope in a harsh and hopeless situation, giving a voice to those who were most affected by the turbulence. "It is our story, the kids' story," Maldonado writes. "I have lived a long life with the darkness. It is time to set it free." The hardships and simple pleasures told by Bonnie Buckley Maldonado and her brother Patrick F. Buckley will resound with readers of childhood memoirs, Western history, and poetry alike.