Burns’s eruptions survey, among other topics, what seems “the coming end of the world” and his hopes that perhaps there’s a better one to be discovered. Burns takes on the terror of his times—he likens living during the Covid-19 pandemic to being “the only passenger on a plane that I understand will soon run out of fuel”—but also the everyday experiences that make those times worth enduring. He captures the collective transcendence of experiencing live music (“Hearts pause, / imprinted with wonder.”) and the transformative power of encounters with nature (a spring thicket “poking me to let me know/I’m alive and human to a fault”). His touch can be engagingly light, as in a block-text consideration of scribbling notes on napkins: “it beats the alternatives, which are gazing endlessly—like a self-absorbed dope with mind-numbing consequences—into the idiot-slab (iPhone)”.
That line’s a joke with teeth, exemplifying what is, for Burns, a need to write: it beats the alternatives. The collection builds to a prose piece, “Adrift at Sea,” that circles feelings of loneliness and longing–and the suspicion that the narrator will become “a once-vivid memory soon replaced by a more present thought.” That narrator knows that books, though, endure, making past present, staying vivid even as all else fades.
Takeaway: These poetic eruptions strive for meaning and connection in a world seemingly lurching to its end.
Great for fans of: Heather June Gibbons, Campbell McGrath.
Production grades
Cover: A-
Design and typography: A
Illustrations: A
Editing: A
Marketing copy: A
