Flutter

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Nova Scotia poet Alice Burdick’s second major poetry collection is a cat’s cradle of startling imagistic leaps and quiet meditations. Burdick sets her lateral gaze on small-town news stories, banal occurrences, and the tiny things of a semi-rural life. In the tradition of John Ashbery or Lorine Niedecker, her cubist portraits and landscapes are imbued with a joyous wordplay, even when the poems are heartbreaking. Each Burdick poem Ñ whether it’s five lines or five pages Ñ is a journey of surprise, bewilderment, and perhaps even revelation.

AUTHOR

Alice Burdick

Alice Burdick is a poet and visual-arts writer living in Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia, where she lives with her husband, Zane, and daughter Hazel. She was born and grew up in Toronto, and has been involved in the small press community since 1990. She is the author of the full-length poetry collections Simple Master (Pedlar Press), Flutter (Mansfield Press) and Holler (Mansfield Press), as well as many chapbooks. Her work has appeared in the anthology Surreal Estate: 13 Canadian Poets Under the Influence (The Mercury Press, 2004).

Reviews

Mental radio combs the Nova Scotia air: a fragment of language, a quick burst of landscape, static of the daily news. Alice Burdick’s Flutter is restless, nervous, invigorating, the fearsome uncertainty of thought flickering (fluttering) over the gaps. Tense and unpretty, it is a book to reckon with.Ó (Maggie Helwig)