In his plain-spoken lyrics and dramatic monologues, Michael Burns digs at the marrow. His poems—in formal and free verse—are quick, incisive, and always capable of revealing the dark whimsies of fate and the pain of our own actions and inactions.
These poems travel to Casqui mounds in the Arkansas Delta, traffic-clogged urban streets, a wasteland in Oklahoma, and Faulkner’s Rowan Oak. They assume the voices of others so convincingly that we find ourselves face to face with hunters, philanderers, husbands, a Union general, a Snopes, and even a version of God.
Gathering the images of each place, crafting lines in clear, unpretentious language, Burns comes across new knowledge, confronting the ever-present mysteries and the ways the mind loves to lie to itself.
Author of three poetry collections, Michael Burns teaches creative writing and English at Southwest Missouri State University. For the University of Arkansas Press, he edited Discovery and Reminiscence: Essays on the Poetry of Mona Van Duyn. His poems have appeared in Poetry, the Paris Review, the Southern Review, and many other journals and anthologies.
“Clarifying the language like so much butter, Michael Burns provides a particular insight into national, local, masculine, and finally human concerns, all with a dry eye and a warm heart. It is the very best butter.”
—Richard Howard
“I like the way Michael Burns’s quiet irony and a submerged ache work their way to the surface of the language in poems whose transparent simplicity proves deceptive.”
—Rachel Hadas
“Loneliness, pain, emptiness, banality—these are the afflictions that attack the humanity in Michael Burns’s powerful poetry. And they are the sorrows that the rounds of daily life try, and sometimes manage, to assuage. ‘I didn’t come this far to find what’s real,’ says an amateur archaeologist. But the poet who reports the line has come a long way and delivers to us only what is real. Admirably honest, honestly admirable: It Will Be All Right in the Morning is the true thing.”
—Fred Chappell
