Kirjahaku

Winner of the 2004 Donald Hall Prize in PoetryThe Improbable Swervings of Atoms follows the comedic, often painful, physical and emotional travails of a young boy growing up in 1950s America. He watches the McCarthy hearings, conquers the Congo, assassinates the president, has his head stuffed into a toilet, drops his uniform on the fifty-yard line, and tries to make sense of Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura.The poems engage history in a very intimate way, revealing how a boy, as he matures, attempts to understand the world around him, his own physical development, the people in his life, and what it means to live in a country and time where it is impossible to disengage oneself from world events—where, in fact, the quest for identity is an act that requires one to rewrite history in personal terms.

Herman Melville, Matthew Arnold, Sarah Orne Jewett, Dusty Rhodes, and Hoyt Wilhelm skinny-dip and pick up gondoliers and cut figure eights into the ice in Christopher Bursk’s new collection. But the main cast of characters for these poems is the alphabet itself, “the first inhabitants of Arcadia, / now homesick, curious exiles from Eden.” Here are a boy’s first investigations into the nature of language as he studies the backs of baseball cards, and a young man’s infatuation with the “F-word.” The titles sing their lettered songs: “An Ode to j,” “M-m-m Good!” and “O in Trouble.”Here are “reading lessons,” the author’s exploration of the curses and blessings of the word. It is about the fall from paradise and the gifts that fall makes possible. And over the whole book broods the great lexicographer, Samuel Johnson, that deeply troubled caretaker of the mother tongue. More than an ABC book, this collection asks questions at the very heart of how we understand the world and shows us the glory and silliness at the heart of human life.

Equal parts personal and mythical, Christopher Bursk speaks to fear and anger with candor to acknowledge their place alongside forgiveness and love in a life well lived and a life thoroughly examined. With a career already spanning decades, Christopher Bursk once again offers readers a glimpse into a life of moments captured in poems of comfort and of longing. This book is for those who search for moments alone, moments shared. For those who understand terror as an instrument of desire and of uncertainty.

The poetry of A Car Stops And A Door Opens gives us an insight into the anguish of longing, be it the longings of a troubled student or an elderly grandparent. It is poetry that is grounded in the particulars of both childhood and adulthood, and poetry for anyone who remembers what it’s like to be a kid and long for something you can’t put a name to. Not afraid to be naked and to laugh at this nakedness, it knows the sublime and the ridiculous and embraces both.

This is a collection of original poems by Christopher Bursk. The poems are inspired by Vergil's Aeneid and deal with modern issues of love, loss, family, masculinity, and more. Many of the epigraphs are in Latin from the Aeneid and some are translated into English.

"Choose one or the other, demands the light. / Choose both, says the dark." ANSWER THE DOOR votes with the dark and its predilection for paradox and possibility. These poems invite readers into a world populated by imaginary friends, 1950s television icons, inmates at a county prison, lead pirates, plastic knights, a Sunday school class and Jesus's secret lover, Quintilian and Oneal Moore, Salome and Deborah Kerr, Pixie the Dog and a cat named Schr dinger. The book is grounded in the resonant particulars of our daily lives and in the longings that inform them; it puts its faith in the mysteries inherent in these lives and in these longings. It trusts in language's insatiable hungers. It argues for a justice inseparable from compassion and a beauty inextricable from loss. It is grateful for the hard work of propositions to keep us rooted in time and place.