Unsleeping: Poems

by Michael Burkard

Michael Burkard's eighth and most experimental book of poetry.

Genres: Poetry

88 pages, Hardcover

First published February 1, 2001

About the author

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.

Reviews

[Edita · Rating 4 out of 5]

Maybe I want to stop,
to stop this, what has been going
on all these years, what sideways
sea or life am I trying to steer
clear of knowing how deeply it touched
me, how deeply it held me, how deeply
someone took me from this—

*

[…] Talking
is painful, but it feels sometimes as if that is all there ever was, that
it isn’t (is not) painful at all.

*

But I wanted to find a way back to you. Like the moon.
And this seemed as good as any.

[xtina · Rating 4 out of 5]

“I am a postcard of snow and you are my footstep.”

[Patricia Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed entering this world of dream-like syntax and innuendo. Some of my favorite lines:

A fairy tale with a bridge leading to a penis?

Today's crisis is entitled "Sunlight."

When the remembering is a you against a you you do not recall.

One time he washed the moon and put it in his pocket.

Two blackbirds have more space than they can handle.

Things become is.

[jess sanford · Rating 1 out of 5]

Yeah, it's pretty awful.