Poetry. "THIS LAST TIME WILL BE THE FIRST TIME is on the move and making connections. It looks like a perfect pitch. A perfect pitch is only so with contact, with connection. These poems are for contact and making connections, and refusing connections, wanting connections, and denying connections, loving connections, reinventing connections. Alessandrelli writes, 'I am squinting into the faint radiance / of the sun, its light / trying to shine'--THIS LAST TIME WILL BE THE FIRST TIME is full of resolutely flickering light. These poems are at work with Emerson's idea that, 'A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.' The mind at work in these poems is not little. It is expansive, it is growing, it is looking to love."--Emily Pettit "Continue on with your impulse to buy this book. You will learn things reading it and feel a little smarter, and that is a special kind of pleasure. Jeff Alessandrelli does a beautiful job u

The Last Time Will Be The First

Literature & Fiction

ALESSANDRELLI, JEFF

Poetry

Burnside Review Press

Poetry. "Sometimes transcendent joy is sitting quietly and plainly in front of us. Or it arrives when we aren't looking for it. We may look at it or ponder it and simply blink—the stunned heart, the stunned mind. An epiphany is one thing, but being present for the beauty and kindness to be found in the ordinary world is something else. And to feel such beauty and kindness may be seeking us, inviting our regard, is indeed a mystery. Poetry, or art of some form, is one of the few responses one can make. Prayer is another, followed by silence. The poems in this fine book eloquently reveal the everyday mysteries all around us, and make it plain that any response deepens the heart—and that becomes a further mystery."—Maurice Manning

Mysteries in a World That Thinks There Are None

McDowell, Gary

Abattoir

Mao, Angelo

Winner of the 2020 Burnside Review Press Book Award, selected by Jennifer Chang 
"An ecstatic skeptic, Meghan Maguire Dahn writes at the edges of knowledge and feeling to excavate a life out of the god-hungry, terrified, and terrifying landscape that is our contemporary moment. In poems of extraordinary vulnerability and bravery, she speaks of 'the hidden things,' of the 'abyss in the body,' in a 'state suspended by imperfect choices,' and with 'the stutter-green sorrow of our whole world.' To read Domain is to recognize such uncanny wisdom with relief and a little bit of fear, and so it is impossible not to put your faith in--to be touched by--Dahn's wondrous and bountiful perspicacity."--Jennifer Chang 
Poetry.

Domain

Dahn, Meghan Maguire

Winner of the 2021 Burnside Review Press Book Award, selected by Sommer Browning. "They say timing is everything. I can't remember what they say that about. Romance? Language? In Nathaniel Rosenthalis' I WON'T BEGIN AGAIN, timing is everything is true for just about everything. From mis-overhearing small profundities on the street to 'the motion of coming down a stair' Rosenthalis shows that our inescapable timelines are beautiful and lonely and funny. In 'A Ten-Minute Moment' he slows time and guides us through that sparkling carelessness with which we first turn over an hourglass to the antsy loss we feel watching the last grain of sand fall to the bottom. He writes with an easy, abstract humor: 'I am often,' he says in a poem called 'On Where I'm Not Supposed to Exist.' He writes with a boundarylessness between the 'I' and all that is outside it: 'A newspaper blows across the hardwood floor, making me want to be held. I write down "Behold."' These poems highlight the way the world works its constant absurdity and they help us feel okay when we realize we work that same way. A dangerous desire, love, and intimacy ripple through the poems: 'how / hot it was when // he slammed what / a door had been, for him. / Into me.' I get that. Damn do I get that--to feel most alive when loved and loving. It stops the clock for a moment."--Sommer Browning "'My devotion, after all / is that I even got up,' says Nathaniel Rosenthalis, belying the title of his mesmerizing debut, I Won't Begin Again. For, in poem after poem, Rosenthalis argues for--and enacts--resilience in a world where doubt can seem 'the architecture of the moment.' 'Not fantasizing, not hoping, was error also,' and indeed these poems resist the world's (and the self's) instability by noticing the least detail ('it was like / resistance // to notice, so / I did. And do') but through a teetering of vision: a green wall is 'millionly leafy,' the sun 'crumples one random can,' which is to say that the poems are acts of reinvention, of reimagining life's possibilities. Philosophical, surreal in the tradition of Rimbaud's Illuminations, and slyly erotic, I Won't Begin Again is finally a triumph of emotion, what Rosenthalis defines as 'putting yourself over another / to make a different sense.' I feel changed by these poems--powerfully so, gratefully." --Carl Phillips Poetry.

I Won’t Begin Again

Rosenthalis, Nathaniel