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Cover credits: Cover design: Kyle G. Hunter. Cover photograph: Berenice Abbott,
Murray Hill Hotel from Park Avenue and 40th Street, Manhattan, November
19, 1935. (c) Photography Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach
Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, The |
“Each of the four sections of this book is punctuated by Burt’s
brilliant version of a poem by Callimachus. Burt thereby casts an eerie
light on the American life that fills the rest of his book, as the
poems move from the endless deferral of adolescence (‘we will know who
we are once we have won’) to the plenitude and deprivations that
sustain adulthood. This is a masterly book by one of the most gifted
poets of his generation.” —Frank Bidart |
Price: $14.00 USD
Consult any childhood development guide and you'll run across the
term "parallel play": when children under two are placed together,
they'll play separately but won't interact. Stephen Burt’s second
collection of poems describes lovers, friends,
travelers, and revelers attempting lives dependent on each other but
still pulled inevitably into preoccupations of their own
self-awareness.
In precisely crafted poems rife with humor and insight,
Burt looks for answers in his own life and among his coterie of
characters and venues—from the rock clubs of New York City to the
basketball courts of the WNBA, from the canvases of Kline and Richter
to the canvassers in a hard-fought election. Parallel Play confirms Stephen Burt as one of America’s most exciting new voices.
“Stephen Burt has found a courage I’d never imagined until I read these
poems. It is the courage to expound the consolations of Terror, to
declare that we are the Ancients of ourselves, already more accustomed
than we know to life in the ruins. With Parallel Play, Burt becomes the
Cavafy of these former United States. It will be a privilege to await
the barbarians in his good company.” —Donald Revell
"Burt, the finest critic of his generation, has struck out on his own.
It is time now to celebrate Burt’s other real work. Here, in his second
book of poems, Parallel Play, he writes, mockingly: ‘I have been
identified / as gifted & dangerous.’ Gifted—simply so.
Dangerous—but only in these little aeries hewn in the fierce clutch of
his (deeply) American intelligences.” —Lucie Brock-Broido
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