Advice from the Lights
Poems
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
“The brightest and most inviting of Burt’s collections for readers of any, all, and no genders.”—Boston Review
Advice from the Lights is a brilliant and candid exploration of gender and identity and a series of looks at a formative past. It’s part nostalgia, part confusion, and part an ongoing wondering: How do any of us achieve adulthood? And why would we want to, if we had the choice? This collection is woven from and interrupted by extraordinary sequences, including Stephanie poems about Stephen’s female self; poems on particular years of the poet’s early life, each with its own memories, desires, insecurities, and pop songs; and versions of poems by the Greek poet Callimachus, whose present-day incarnation worries (who doesn’t?) about mortality, the favor of the gods, and the career of Taylor Swift. The collection also includes poems on politics, location, and parenthood. Taken all together, this is Stephen Burt’s most personal and most accomplished collection, an essential work that asks who we are, how we become ourselves, and why we make art.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Poet and critic Burt (The Poem Is You) diagnoses feelings of alienation and its possible antidotes in this touching portrait series of self and family. The sensation of being "not at home anywhere" motivates a search for home everywhere. A remarkable imagination allows Burt (who also goes by Steph or Stephanie, and uses the pronoun they) to convincingly identify with an array of different figures: princess, stowaway, kite, and water strider, to name a few. The various self-portraits prove that, if nowhere else, Burt is at home in the space of a poem in the "song/ that does not sound, to outsiders, like music at all." Within such a space, Burt demonstrates aptitude with the classical poet's tools: rhyme, alliteration, nuanced enjambment, homophones, and more. Crucially, they are comfortable with what poems can help readers work toward: "wish-fulfillment// is the hidden/ goal of every poem,/ except when it is the obvious/ goal, in which case the hidden/ goal is something like learn/ how to live in this world." These poems achieve something rare, helping readers to "learn/ how to live in this world" more attentively. And, sensitive to the rigors of living in a body, moment, or world that can so often feel alien, Burt shares some additional advice: "Please, everybody alive,/ do your best to stay that way.")
