Ejo: Poems, Rwanda, 1991-1994 (Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry)

In 1994 the worst episode of genocide since the Holocaust of the Second World War ravaged the Central African country of Rwanda. Derick Burleson lived there and taught at the National University during the two years leading up to the genocide. The poems in this collection explore the cataclysm in a variety of forms and voices through the culture, myths, and customs he absorbed during this time. Ejo, meaning "yesterday and tomorrow" in Kinyarwandan, celebrates in language both lyrical and austere the lives of the friends Burleson made in Rwanda, those who survived to tell their own stories, and those whose voices were silenced.

Literature & Fiction

Burleson, Derick

Poetry

University of Wisconsin Press

<p>In 1994 the worst episode of genocide since the Holocaust of the Second World War ravaged the Central African country of Rwanda. Derick Burleson lived there and taught at the National University during the two years leading up to the genocide. The poems I</p>

Poetry. "Should we have stayed at home, wherever that may be?" a traveler writes in a notebook at the end of Elizabeth Bishop's "Questions of Travel." The poems in NEVER NIGHT ask the same question as they travel textual geographies from wheat farm to boreal forest, from a cave become fallout shelter to a spy satellite's view of a wrecked oil tanker, from a gold mine's tailings to a child burying a dead guinea pig. Whether investigating a derailed train, a two-headed moose fetus or a melting glacier, these poems reveal wounded earth giving birth to shimmering form, death held at bay without artifice in the meditations of a child's new words. "NEVER NIGHT is a hymn to life, a meditation on day and night, on the seasons, on nature and on love. Alaska may be real chilly in the winter but these beautiful poems are more than warm. Apparently poetry can change climate..."--Adam Zagajewski.

Never Night

Marick Press

Poetry. "Burleson sees what we all see, or are willingly blind to, or cannot bear to see: that we are here for only a moment, that we are meaningless in the very same instant that we are nearly godlike with meaning."—Zinta Aistars"Burleson's poems are engaging because he reaches out to his audience, and the audience he imagines is as lively as any poet could hope to have. The respect which he gives his readers (and listeners) creates layers of meaning, and allows his audience to participate—by which, I mean, there is a feeling as if we are in conversation with the poet."—Mercedes O'Leary

Calypso Editions

Poetry. "Writing from near the Arctic Circle. the marvelous Derick Burleson has wrought an erotic masterpiece. MELT is a metaphor for that which lives on in us against impending loss—sexual and precise, full of the images of the ever thawing earth. He enacts through lyric language a new way of seeing for our survival, immersed in the joy and joining of our human bodies, because 'after all the phosphorescent / beings beneath your separate / skins mountains and glaciers / too beautiful to live beneath.' You could die of beauty here."—Sean Thomas Dougherty"The sense-drenched offerings in MELT once again cement Derick Burleson's role as unflinching witness, a master spinner of huge tales in tiny spaces. The insistent lyrical current that pulses through these deftly-forged stanzas create a music that will immediately enthrall and captivate the reader. Burleson is a startlingly good poet who burns down borders with every word."—Patricia Smith

Melt

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Burleson, Derick. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Burleson, Derick

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Burleson, Derick. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Ejo: Poems, Rwanda, 1991-1994 (Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry)

Ejo: Poems, Rwanda, 1991-1994 (Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry)

Never Night

Use

Melt