Alice Burdick
ISBN 978-1-894469-41-8
$16.95 CDN
98 pp
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 — whether it’s five lines or five pages — is a journey of surprise, bewilderment, and perhaps even revelation.
Praise for Flutter
“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.”
– Maggie Helwig
“What I love most in poetry when it’s good (and Alice Burdick’s poetry is uncommonly good) is not just the obvious skill at work but also that clear sense that the poet firmly believes there’s still something important about writing it. That poetry, like anything humanly useful, starts now — from this moment, not the next or last or some repackaged version of somewhere else. For all their glorious idiosyncrasy and unrepentant abstraction, Burdick’s poems are as clean, as raw, and as unpretentious as breathing in and breathing out.”
– Kevin Connolly
11.15.09
Flutter reviewed over on The Northern Poetry Review
11.10.09
Flutter reviewed in the Prarie Fire Review of Books
10.26.09
Flutter reviewd in Matrix 84: The New Vancouver
05.01.09
Margaret Christakos on Alice Burdick’s “Winter Here”
04.19.09
Flutter reviewed in The Chronicle Herald
04.01.09
Alice Burdick reads from Flutter over at Seen Reading’s 30 in 30
03.09.09
Ottawa poet rob mclennan on Flutter
