The First Inhabitants of Arcadia: Poems
“Chris Bursk honors the human spirit without ignoring the destructive forces around us. What’s more, he does it with language that never alters. How much I admire his intelligent, elegant, and deeply compassionate work.”— Sy Safransky, editor, The Sun“In these lively and moving poems, Bursk implicates English itself in his coming-of-age conflicts. And what Bursk humorously wishes in his lyric about ‘suffixes and prefixes’ is true—he is ‘Irreplaceable, / incomparable, indispensable.’— Philip Fried, editor, Manhattan Review“Armed with a refreshing sense of play and an eye for the luminous moment, Bursk is one of our best practitioners of the narrative poem. Yet he is also wonderfully lyrical: his language is honed and hits you where you live.”— Steven Huff, author of The Water We Came From