ABOUT THIS BOOK

Herman Melville, Matthew Arnold, Sarah Orne Jewett, Dusty Rhodes, and Hoyt Wilhelm skinny-dip and pick up gondoliers and cut figure eights into the ice in Christopher Bursk’s new collection. But the main cast of characters for these poems is the alphabet itself, “the first inhabitants of Arcadia, / now homesick, curious exiles from Eden.” Here are a boy’s first investigations into the nature of language as he studies the backs of baseball cards, and a young man’s infatuation with the “F-word.” The titles sing their lettered songs: “An Ode to j,” “M-m-m Good!” and “O in Trouble.”

Here are “reading lessons,” the author’s exploration of the curses and blessings of the word. It is about the fall from paradise and the gifts that fall makes possible. And over the whole book broods the great lexicographer, Samuel Johnson, that deeply troubled caretaker of the mother tongue. More than an ABC book, this collection asks questions at the very heart of how we understand the world and shows us the glory and silliness at the heart of human life.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Christopher Bursk, recipient of NEA, Guggenheim, and Pew fellowships, is professor of English at Bucks County Community College in Pennsylvania. He is the author of a number of collections, including Cell Count, Ovid at Fifteen, and The Improbable Swervings of Atoms, winner of the 2004 Donald Hall Prize in Poetry. He has been recognized for his work with prisoners, the homeless, food banks, and women’s shelters.

REVIEWS

“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

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents
1
Learning to Read	000
Don't Move	000
More Investigations into the Nature of Language	000
The Ars Poetica of Baseball Cards	000
Servants	000
Multiple Personality Disorder	000
F	000 [DES: See author's original. This should be a cursive "F."]
Ode to J	000
Letter L as in Reliable, Indomitable, Chivalrous	000
M-m-m Good!	000
Hearing the Word for the First Time	000
At an Early Age a Boy Discovers the Pleasures and Perils of Double o	000
Why a Boy Is Drawn to Lowercase p	000
Vocabulary Test	000
zippity oscar	000 [DES: See author's original. This should be the 
symbols as in the original. The font is Wingdings.]
What a Boy Knows and Doesn't Know	000
Dictionary Johnson	000
2
Working the Stacks	000
O in Trouble	000
Lycidas	000
Scintillating? 	000
F this and F that	000
Small r	000
The CIA Tries to Dispose of Still Another Mutilated Body	000
"Memorize 'Dover Beach' for Monday"	000
A Very Short Sonnet Cycle	000
Who Hears Talk Now of Boudoir?	000
Skinny Dipping	000
Biographical Fallacy	000
The Pathetic Fallacy	000
3
The Burden of Being the First Letter in the Alphabet	000
Boycott Lettuce! Boycott Grapes! 	000
The Vanity of Human Wishes	000
Trying to Make Sense of a Single Word	000
True Readings	000
The Importance of Punctuation	000
Not for Love or Money. Not on Your Life	000
The Dropped Stapler Just Misses the Baby's Head	000
It's Not the End of the World	000
No Extenuating Circumstances	000
Count to a Thousand before You Open the Door	000
Maybe	000
Insufficient, Incompetent, Incapable	000
Here	000
My Son's First Real Attempt to Grow a Beard	000
"The business of a poet"	000
4
What if You Could Be Any Letter?	000
Say the Magic Word	000
No Weapons of Mass Destruction Found	000
. . . y	000
Zero: A Found Poem	000
Babbadino	000
Walking the Beach, September 10, 2001	000
The Sixth Letter, the One with Its Arms Outstretched	000
What's Worth Keeping	000
What's Missing in the Dictionary	000
The Visitor	000

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