Reviews of Chrstopher Bursk's Work
__________________________________________________________________

Winner of the 2002 Green Rose Prize

Christopher Bursk’s latest collection is not just profoundly honest; it is profoundly brave. These astonishing poems explore the space between sensuality, sexuality, and love—a landscape in which flawed human beings give birth to the flawed human beings who will one day take care of them, each generation screwing up even as it adds to the universal fund of beauty and compassion. Above all, Ovid at Fifteen reminds us what it means to feel the wonder of life too keenly—to “want to throw yourself / off the cliff, plunge / into the very heart of color.” If Bursk’s ordinary yet mythic heroes hold back, they do so not out of cowardice but because they remember what happened to Icarus. And so they watch, and dream, and feel, and thus “make a living / out of aching . . .” The greatness of this book lies in its immortalizing that ache, that delicious pain.

"In Ovid at Fifteen, Christopher Bursk returns to myth again and again, finding it transformed each time and then allowing it to transform us. LikeOvid before him, he examines transformation in particular, and in his hands it becomes a metaphor for growing, aging, changing . . .In Ovid at Fifteen, Bursk does walk familiar grounds, but in walking them we discover along with him that those grounds are never the way we'd remembered them, that even the common things that haunt them 'sparrows, blue jays, dragonflies' are in constant flux and still have the capacity to delight and move."

—Maia McAleavey, Poet Lore

"What poem after poem in Ovid at Fifteen presents is a delicious and delirium-fraught sense of being overwhelmed by having a body capable of pleasures so intense they beg comparison with Whitman's lines in 'Song of Myself' where he says, 'breathe the fragrance myself and know it and likeit;/ The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it.'. . . Bursk's persona in Ovid at Fifteen does succumb to the intoxication. He suggests through the narratives that he repeatedly flirted with answering the question of whether he would pay the ultimate price to get the whole experience of life with a resounding Yes."

—Bill Tremblay, American Book Review, May-June 2004

Praise for Places of Comfort, Places of Justice:
__________________________________________________________________

“Here are songs for the misplaced, the ignored; the small, horrible pains we have all swallowed. Bursk’s anger and tenderness come not out of a detached professional curiosity, but from the vision and skin of a man who has been there, lived and survived it. That he works this into true song is the triumph of this book, of himself, of poetry.”

—Cornelius Eady

Praise for The Way Water Rubs Stone:
__________________________________________________________________

“Christopher Bursk writes with unflinching honesty, exploring private griefs and passions; through his gift for metaphor, the poems become not pleas for special treatment, but experiences the reader enters, and shares. Through Bursk’s imagination, we become partakers, as Yeats said. We must not turn away.”

—Joan Aleshire

Praise for Cell Count:
__________________________________________________________________

“Most of the people in these pages . . . are here because of a momentary lapse, a violent act of passion, a loss of control, a single act that has destroyed their lives . . . It is difficult for most of us in good stead to find an advocate; the branded and penned people in the margins are lucky to have the voice, and compassion, of Christopher Bursk.”

—Louis McKee, American Book Review