Booklife Review

Burrell’s searching third poetry collection, following Troubler and The Skin of the River, pricks at the threads of the fantasies that clothe American life, circa right now, offering hard truths but with a practiced subtlety that makes the lies glimmer even as they fall apart. “I have what I call a need for answers,” Burrell writes in “American Umbrella,” “I search them out in Sally Grossman’s red dress”. But instead of answers, that poem’s speaker finds “America’s dream: a loaded gun in this corner [...] a loaded gun in my hand”.

Such charged language and antsy insight power the collection, which is also surreal and dreamlike, mercurial but not unanchored. Resonant motifs emerge throughout, like the characters or concepts of Mr. Night, the Bluebird, and the Stray Field, all of which serve as identities of various poems’ speakers and also as spaces where dreams can both form and disintegrate. In “The Disunited Mind,” the speaker is “planted inside an awful dream that returns the dead to life,” and, “passing through a chronic montage,” implores “God help a man—scraping through these half-mast days—absent and drifting through tall grass in his own stray field.”

Through Oklahoma, Missouri, Ohio, and beyond, the poems survey our “half mast days” and a sprawling American landscape from that “absent and drifting” perspective, as a bird peering down from the skies at the blur of civilization, yet in this expansive setting, Burrell pulls the reader in close. In “Blind Spots Hide Motorcycles Look Twice: A Matching Quiz,” the speaker includes instructions to match lines on the left with their best possible partner line on the right, compelling the reader to engage with his lines as pieces to a puzzle and building a bridge of intimacy between reader and poet that transcends the page. Poetry lovers seeking a song that illuminates America’s dreamworld will find many exemplary ones in Burrell’s collection.

Takeaway: Moonlit, incisive poems of these “half mast days” of American life.

Comparable Titles: Robert Bly’s “Driving West in 1970,” James Tate’s “Pity Ascending With the Fog.”

Production grades
Cover: B+
Design and typography: A
Illustrations: N/A
Editing: A
Marketing copy: A