[For] poetry lovers seeking a song that illuminates America’s dreamworld.
—Publishers Weekly Booklife (Listed as Editor’s Pick)
A stirring and distinctively intimate compilation of poems.
—Kirkus Reviews (Verdict: Get It)
Elijah Burrell’s Skies of Blur is a landmark work of anxious nature writing, anxious urban writing, light music history, Sally Grossman cameos, and the times we pretend to live in. Highest commendation.
—Elizabeth Nelson, singer-songwriter, The Paranoid Style
In Skies of Blur, Elijah Burrell burnishes the cerulean clear. From bull to news to Wright to Ruefle, every titan and permission ignites here. We trust this formally dynamic poet to string a stout path across loss. And he does. These elegiac musics nest redemptive—tender and strong—in the end. Burrell is the sort of seer I am grateful for. And I swear Mance Lipscomb and Zbigniew Herbert strummed and sang along.”
—Abraham Smith, author of Insomniac Sentinel and Dear Weirdo
The outer world’s strangeness impinges on the speaker’s inner landscape, and vice versa, in unpredictable ways. Ambitious and earnest, these skillfully crafted poems are not afraid to take risks—a reminder that sometimes we have to walk the edge to find the center.
—Paulette Guerin (Tupelo Quarterly)
Praise for Skies of Blur (EastOver Press, 2024)
Skies of Blur is a heart-rending and soulful lyric of midlife, a poetic travelogue of the harrowing terrain between innocence and the reinventions of maturity. ‘[S]omewhere in motherless Missouri,’ a mother’s ghost is recollected roadside like a hitchhiking, escaped inmate; a derelict house collapses and feeds a magenta rejuvenation of wildflowers; religious conversions tempt and alcohol consoles as it condemns. Drafting in the slipstream of popular music and the blues, from Elliott Smith to Elvis to Sonny Boy Williamson, many of these poems shudder and reverberate in the maelstrom of contemporary provocations: gun violence, virulent politics, historic pandemics. A slyly ironic humor sneaks in: a stratagem against grief. The claustrophobic rooms of memory haunt and taunt, but the amoral realm of nature reveals pathways of escape. A thrilling foray into the ‘stray field’ of surrealism—where we meet Mr. Night, a Hereford bull reminiscent of Yeats’s and Merrill’s occult interlocutors, as well as Bluebird, the speaker’s alter ego who awaits his ‘winter feathers’—allows for the dreamwork of psychic transformation. In Elijah Burrell’s Skies of Blur, the striking achievement of a timeless voice, the poems not only see and dream but fly and sing.
—Dan O’Brien, author of Our Cancers and War Reporter
In these vivid poems of careful observation, Elijah Burrell documents a rural life that is recorded with exactitude and with sensitivity for his subjects. The poet’s senses are on high alert, as he is not just noting the shifts and changes of the American pastoral as it alters over time; Burrell is also preoccupied with the violence that underlies American culture—and which is now endemic. Burrell’s ardent moral sensibility, his musical ear, and keen powers of description lead him—and us—toward revelation, thoughtfulness, and generosity.
—Mark Wunderlich, author of God of Nothingness and The Earth Avails
In Skies of Blur, [the speakers] come apart … splitting selves and breaking plates. But it is through this fracturing that a new whole is made, a new season is born, and grace is granted.
—Laura Linart (North American Review)
Elijah Burrell’s second collection is a tour de force in both its overarching conception and its granular detail. One minute, as the book “musters me skyward,” I’m mulling its big spiritual questions or its apt organizational trope of the double LP. Next minute, I’m back down in the roadside mallow, delighting in phrases, anecdotes, unforgettable characters. One such character is the collection’s namesake, Troubler. An irresistible mystagogue, he moseys in and out of these poems like a lost angel from Flannery O’Connor’s heaven. Troubler augurs the loss of the protagonist’s mother, and the book’s closing movements reckon with her illness and eventual death. Later on, from “the far darkness,” she returns in everyday sights and sounds. The mother now lives in the son’s imagination. Thanks to the power of this poetry, she lives in the reader’s too.
—Greg Brownderville, author of A Horse with Holes in It
The Skin of the River is a Southern, Biblical phantasmagoria, both funny and horrifying, touched and touching. Elijah Burrell’s terrific first book possesses a rich knowledge of poverty and an even richer understanding of the world both rich and poor. See if you can forget, for instance, ‘Stifling Pot, 1963,’ in which a man goes to the Saturday cockfights to beg for the dead roosters so he can feed his family Sunday dinner. I can’t, and I don’t want to.
—Andrew Hudgins, Pulitzer Prize Finalist and author of Saints and Strangers.
Praise for TROUBLER (Aldrich Press, 2018)
As measured and rapturous as any work of art that expresses profound awe and gratitude, Elijah Burrell’s Troubler opens out into the most luminous spaces of understanding as both a kind of reckoning and resurrection. I turn to intimate poetry of this kind—speech-laden, vivid, and expansive—to remind me of the ordinary pleasures of memory and song.
—Major Jackson, author of Roll Deep and host of the Slowdown Podcast
In Elijah Burrell’s second collection of poems, the past and present echo off each other in visions occasioned by the visitations of the shape-shifting form of the titular Troubler. As Troubler ‘gives notice,’ the poems themselves provide the reader with a different kind of noticing—attention to the specificities of both image and vernacular, sustained looking and satisfying turns of phrase. Infused with music and memory, Troubler complicates our assumptions about coming of age, rendering it a process that reverberates in us long into the life, love, and loss of adulthood.
—Dora Malech, author of Say So and Shore Ordered Ocean
As inventive in its form as Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad and as trenchant in its emotion as the poems of Donald Hall and Robert Hass, Elijah Burrell’s Troubler leaves its lucky reader in hushed, grateful awe. The poems engage their subjects—faith and suffering, love and loss, youth and mortality—with clear-eyed empathy and gorgeous language. Each one is an invitation—to think, to feel, to remember that you’re alive.
—Bret Anthony Johnston, author of Remember Me Like This and director of The Michener Center for Writers
Praise for The Skin of the River
(Aldrich Press, 2014)
You have to love a poet who pens lines like ‘Andy smuggles spank mags / … I hold the wine I swiped / off Harmon’s stoop,’ and ‘frogs … / clopped down the turnpike,’ vividly capturing the sounds and pulsing rhythms of his rural Missouri boyhood. The transporting poems in The Skin of the River contain a world, and whisk us into its midst: alfalfa and peanut fields, cockfights, ‘the alchemy of river water and Cokes,’ ‘odorous loam,’ and bits of perfectly rendered dialogue. Elijah Burrell gives us the grit and spark, the immediacy, the beating heart of a place and its people, with all their magic, guts, grimness, and gusto.
—Amy Gerstler, winner of the 1991 National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry for Bitter Angel.
The characters who populate the stark world of this book could do with a little redemption—they’re reckless and careless, yet prodigals who haven’t wandered far from home. They are fallen and either don’t notice or don’t give a damn. In these poems we have a map to indicate a cultural fallout evident in many American communities over the last thirty-five years or so. It’s been quite a blur, and the strangeness we seek from poetry provides one of the few meaningful responses. I am happy to have this book and the heart behind these poems.
—Maurice Manning, recipient of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award, Pulitzer Prize Nominee (2010), and author of The Gone and the Going Away.