Ovid at Fifteen
Christopher Bursk
14.00 Trade Paper
ISBN: 1-930974-25-6

Look for Ovid at Fifteen in the Spring of 2003

Winner of the 2002 Green Rose Prize

Mr. Bursk’s six previous books include Standing Watch (Houghton Mifflin, 1978), and most recently Cell Count (Texas Tech University Press, 1998). He is the recipient of a Pew Fellowship, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He resides in Langhorne Manor, PA. Ovid at Fifteen will be published by New Issues in March, 2003.

Priase for Cell Count:

"Bursk's poems take us inside, into the huge sad city, the institutional madness, to meet the general population....[His] poems are demanding; they insist on your attention and ask for an open mind. 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

"Cell Count is not just a book about the prison system. When the guard-tower floodlights snap on, trapped in its crossbeams is the book's persona—a college instructor engaged in directing a poetry workshop in a reconverted storage closet in the jail or counseling individual inmates in an interview room more cramped than a cell. He is teacher, poet, political activist, a man committed to making a difference in the lives of his students, yet he doesn't seem certain why he feels compelled to do so; he is not entirely sure he wants to try this hard. Cell Count details the life-quest of this activist who, despite his fears, his hatred of evil, his repugnance for violence, his despair at what may be a hopeless endeavor, still acts, still takes a stand."

                   —Robert A. Fink