Liminal

A native New Englander, Bill Burtis is a graduate of Hobart College and the Writers’ Workshop at The University of Iowa.  He now lives in Exeter, New Hampshire and Readfield, Maine, with the poet Nancy Jean Hill. Liminal is his first full-length collection of poems..  


Over and over, the poet walks straight into mystery and returns, always changed, to tell us exactly who is wearing wings and why we are often blind to them, especially our own. 

– Mekeel McBride, author of Dogstar Delicatessen 


This is the world of real relationships, real children, real history, real joys and failures, inhabited by real owls and bats and coyotes, along with real stands of sugar maple and pine groves, snowy mountains and woodland ponds.  These poems effectively ease you over that threshold to the world of what-if and if-only, the realm of existential pondering and deep interrogation of the self, the territory of nightmares of regret and visions of resolution, poignant dread and soothing hope.  Burtis’s poems always transport you to such a threshold to make you feel you are about to learn to fly, and fill you with that rare joy that only real art can conjure.

–Jim Crenner, author of Drinks at the Stand-Up Tragedy Club


Few poets are as comfortable in liminal space as Burtis. Fewer still are those who write from within that space with such precise and loving detail, where the scars of childhood, traces of ancestors, and mysteries of landscape all become sacramental. Follow Burtis into liminal space and you just may learn to read your life backward and understand, and read it forward with hope.

– Bill Schulz, editor, The Hole-in-the-Head Review