words / Bud Smith

drawings / Rae Buleri

"A simple walk through Dust Bunny City is sometimes enough to kill the ones you love." Take the walk with Bud Smith. He'll take care of you.

Elle Nash interviewed Bud Smith & Rae Buleri over at Hobart, read it here! 

"Dust Bunny City reads as a love letter and homage, a bemused observation of the good, the bad and the ugly; observations of the ridiculous and the sublime, a prayer and a songbook." - Maxwell Gillan Maxwell, Heavy Feather Review

"Read this book while I was drunk and going through a breakup. It's a good book to read drunk/with a broken heart. Bud tells you about his life. Jukeboxes and dogs and his cool wife (who draws the cool drawings). Bud is the happy prophet of the stupid world. He's reading poetry on the subway. He's frustrated by his t-shirt. He's Walt Whitman only married and working on an oil refinery and there are no poems about Abraham Lincoln. Basically this is the best book I've ever read." 

- Kevin Maloney, author of Cult of Loretta

"My heart swelled to three times its size reading DUST BUNNY CITY. Set against the backdrop of a drunk, pulsing city and shimmering with youthful rapture, Bud Smith captures the singular joy of love with a voice as authentic as the feeling. Complimented by his wife Rae Buleri's dreamy line drawings, this book is a sweet celebration of tenderness in a harsh world."

- Meredith Alling, author of Sing the Song

"My favorite song lyric is 'Street lights. People,' from Journey’s "Don’t Stop Believing," and so it is with great adoration that I say Bud Smith’s DUST BUNNY CITY reminds me of those words. First off, the book includes both street lights and people. There are few guarantees in life, and this is one. But more than that, the book portrays a quiet, simple joy. Of riding the train. Eating a meal. Waiting for a plane. Sitting on a bench. Tiny moments that, when shared, help define what it means to know another person. There is an unimpeachable intimacy at the heart of this book. Bud Smith’s work in DUST BUNNY CITY brings to mind the best of Richard Brautigan: magic, sweetness and wonder in the corners of a ghostly working-class America, and all the ways ”we try to be gentle, but can’t get it right.”

- Dolan Morgan, author of Insignificana

"DUST BUNNY CITY is a lot of things: poetry and visions and winks and inside jokes and love. Bud Smith is in the blood of it all, a loose radical of a man capturing what so many probably never see and giving us these gifts. "You tell me that story every time we're drunk here," is a succinct and true bell ringer. I'd listen to Bud Smith tell me these things over and over again. Don't forget about Bud Smith, because he isn't going to forget about you."

- Sean H. Doyle, author of This Must Be the Place