2001
First Published
4.16
Average Rating
88
Number of Pages
Reading Michael Burkard’s daring new poems is like using a highly sophisticated listening device to eavesdrop on the unconscious. The signal is clear, but what we are hearing is teasingly indeterminent. Burkard has done us the wild favor of removing the usual mediation between waking and dreaming. A melancholy and intensely lyrical voice leads us to the edge of what words can say, and we follow with curiosity and amazement. And then, somehow, the voice goes beyond what can be said. "Michael Burkard has over the years attracted a small but fanatical set of readers. I’m tempted to call him a cult figure, or a poet’s poet . . . he is a school of one . . . a poet whose forte is his hauntedness and his sorrowful expressive mystery. Burkard is a poet who should be read rather than explained, and in an era which our poets’ voices have grown benumbingly interchangeable and predictable, this quality makes Burkard all the more distinct."—David Wojahn in Poetry Unsleeping is Michael Burkard’s eighth collection of poetry. His previous book, Entire Dilemma was published by Sarabande books in 1998, and W.W. Norton published My Secret A Notebook of Prose and Poems in 1990. He has received a Whiting Writers’ Award, the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, and two grants from both the New York State Foundation for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. He has taught at various colleges and universities, most recently Syracuse University, University of Louisville, and LeMoyne College. He lives in Syracuse, New York.
Avg Rating
4.16
Number of Ratings
44
5 STARS
41%
4 STARS
41%
3 STARS
14%
2 STARS
2%
1 STARS
2%
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Author
Michael Burkard
Author · 9 books
He graduated from Hobart College and from the Iowa Writers' Workshop with an MFA in 1973. He taught at Kirkland College (1975–78) and Sarah Lawrence College (1983–84, 1986–87), and has taught in the M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing at Syracuse University since 1997. He has been a visiting writer at New York University (1991) and the University of Louisville (1992, 1996), as well as a writer-in-residence at Austin Peay State University (1990). During the 1990s he has also worked as an alcoholism counselor, particularly with children whose lives have been impacted by alcoholism. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review,The Paris Review, Ploughshares, APR, Ironwood, and Quarterly West.
