In her follow-up to 2008’s Flutter, former big-city-dweller Alice Burdick explores nature and the small town, taking a cue from children learning their voices: “All I see are trucks, / trucks and ducks.” With a blend of playful narrative and an Ashberyesque collage approach, Burdick paints a portrait of our world as one of continuous wonder, and full of relationships—between people, and between people and things—that never die but continually transform, even in death.
On Alice Burdick’s Previous Books
“Her lines are deceptively elementary, but it’s not simplicity they produce, but complex comprehension.” —George Elliott Clarke, The Chronicle Herald
“Burdick [focuses] closely on the sound and spark of her language, often making startling leaps in logic, tone, and theme from one stanza to the next. This imbues the work with a pleasing surrealistic energy.” —David Barrick, Matrix
“An odd oracular voice of someone standing apart and commenting on what she observes floods these utterances. Burdick’s observations merit our attention.” —Lily Iona MacKenzie, Prairie Fire
“An intelligent bold voice without pomp and ceremony.… One gets the impression Burdick could be hiding behind us watching our every misstep, or pointing out spit on the pavement before we slip.” —Candice Daquin, Northern Poetry Review
“These poems bristle with wonderful shocks to perception—intellectual, visceral, and hallucinatory.” —Lance La Rocque, The Drunken Boat
Alice Burdick lives and writes poetry in Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia. She shares a home with her husband and two young children. Alice moved to Halifax in 2002 from Toronto, Ontario, where she was born and raised. She has also lived in Espanola, Vancouver, and on the Sechelt Peninsula in BC.
Burdick has been involved with the small press community in Canada since the early 1990's, when she was co-editor, with Victor Coleman, of The Eternal Network. This very small ongoing imprint produced chapbooks, including several of her own works, such as Signs Like This, Fun Venue, and Voice of Interpreter. Her work has been published by other small presses in Canada, including: Proper Tales Press (a Time, My Lump in the Bed: Love Poems for George W. Bush); Letters Press (Covered); and BookThug (The Human About Us). It also has appeared in various magazines, such as Dig, Wat!magazine, subTerrain, fhole, This Magazine, and Who Torched Rancho Diablo? From 1992-1995, Alice was assistant coordinator of the Toronto Small Press Fair. She has also done numerous readings over the years in many different venues, including the Ottawa International Writers Festival, The Scream in High Park in Toronto, and the Halifax Word on the Street.
Alice's third full-length collection, Holler, was released in April 2012 through Mansfield Press, which published her second collection, Flutter. Her poems have also appeared in Shift & Switch: New Canadian Poetry (The Mercury Press, Fall 2005), Surreal Estate: 13 Canadian Poets Under the Influence, An Anthology of Surrealist Canadian Poetry (The Mercury Press, Fall 2004), and in Pissing Ice: An Anthology of 'New' Canadian Poets, (BookThug, 2004). Her frst perfect-bound book was Simple Master, published in 2002 by Pedlar Press.