“CM Burroughs’s debut collection of poetry, The Vital System, invites the reader to consider what survives, and more specifically, explores the discourses of body-making and femininity by examining a speaker’s three-month premature birth as a 1 lb. 12 oz. baby. The collection weaves surgeons, mother, sister, and lover into a haunting choreography of dangerous gestures. The speaker is almost always on the edge of the ‘vital system.’ When she is not, she reminisces and strokes the scars on her belly, meditating on the interaction of bodies to bodies, instrument to body, technology to body.”
—Megan Fernandes, Boston Review
“The inscripted body of Burroughs’s debut collection, while implicated in modes of self-production and self-observation, as well as networks of power, is neither passive or compliant: the body and its zones of sensation, sympathy, and memory is mobile, erotic, and fully awake to the splendor and violence of becoming human, in a body marked by difference (race, gender) in the world.”
—Virginia Konchan, iO Poetry
“The poem and the poems that follow are remarkable not only for their harrowing subject matter but for their demonstration of how subject matter can put enormous pressure on technique, allowing the poet to make original and exciting formal discoveries. I can’t think of anyone else who is writing poems quite like CM Burroughs’s, and this is a book that deserves all the attention it will undoubtedly receive.”
—Aaron Baker, On the Seawall