Very clean and tight copy. Corner is slightly rubbed. Size: 6" x 9". No marks. Binding is tight, covers and spine fully intact. All edges are clean. NOT ex-library. All books offered from DSB are stocked at our store in Fayetteville, AR. Shipped Weight: Under 1 kilogram. Category: Poetry; ISBN: 0395271185. ISBN/EAN: 9780395271186. Inventory No: 025266.

Standing Watch (Houghton Mifflin New Poetry Series)

Bursk, Christopher

Houghton/Mifflin

Winner of the 2004 Donald Hall Prize in Poetry
The 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.

The Improbable Swervings of Atoms (Pitt Poetry Series)

Literature & Fiction

Poetry

University of Pittsburgh Press

In 1996, 1.2 million citizens were incarcerated in U.S. prisons for violent crimes and other felonies. By the year 2000, that number is expected to exceed 2 million. In response to this crisis, throughout the nation, programs built largely on the work of volunteers have risen to challenge traditional concepts about the prison system and rehabilitation, and to engender a new awareness of possibilities. Cell Count, an eloquent and sensitive collection of poems, is the product of one such program. Cell Count’s teacher-persona struggles to come to terms with his inmate-students who are tragically much more than the sum of their crimes.“Cell Count is not a book for Sunday afternoon reading. Innocently, I stepped across the line into Christopher Bursk’s world. An iron gate clanged shut, and I was alone, a red beam. . .aimed straight into my eyes, ‘digging a tunnel into my brain./I had to stare into the center of that burning/till it was all I could see.’“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 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

Cell Count (Ttup Invited Poets Series)

Texas Tech University Press

The Way Water Rubs Stone

Word Works

Place of residence (Sparrow poverty pamphlets)

Sparrow Press

Places of Comfort, Places of Justice: Poems

Humanities and Arts Press

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.

The First Inhabitants of Arcadia: Poems

University of Arkansas Press

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.

Dear Terror

Read Furiously

Poetry. THE INFATUATIONS AND INFIDELITIES OF PRONOUNS, a series of sonnets after Shakespeare, won Bright Hill Press's Poetry Chapbook competition. "Christopher Bursk is our supreme poet of adolescent angst. He is passionate, sincere, brave and, yes#8212;visionary. He knows that nowhere is the profane and the sacred more entwined than during adolescence, and comically so, humor being squeezed from anguished teenage pores. Of necessity, and natural bent, he is a high roller of risk. Who else would dare to riff on Shakespeare's sonnets in such an audacious, irreverent, witty and pronoun-nuanced way? if you like your sex complicatedly raw, your adolescence complicatedly ture, your Shakespeare respectfully adulterated, and most important, your language and poetics bluntly articulate...then, dear reader, this is the book for you"—George Drew.

The Infatuations and Infidelities of Pronouns (At Hand Poetry Chapbook, 32)

Bright Hill Press

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.

A Car Stops A Door Opens

CavanKerry Press

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