Accessible and finely honed, as obsessed with the possibility of words as with emotion, Paul Vermeersch’s poems engage and fire and etch their way in — way down deep. Burn mixes spit and sweat and flakes of lye to scar intricate and beautiful patterns in the shapes of animals, friends, family. In Burn, the dark moments of childhood contrast with the epiphanies and horrors which attend illness and death. Sex, too, insinuates and asserts itself. And after Vermeersch’s conflagration nothing remains untouched.