There Are Words by Burt Kimmelman

“Burt Kimmelman’s poems flourish as they pivot from a repertoire of reiterated subjects—works of art, natural landscapes, family, the animal world—to a transfiguring notion of their properties and possibilities. For over twenty-five years, this practice has produced dynamic patterns of insight, patterns comprised of recurring figures and forms which nevertheless shift in their relations to his poetic witness.” – Jon Curley (of) Talisman: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics

An Excerpt

Ed Ruscha’s Course of Empire

The clouds overhead,
dark filaments of
a roughed-up sky – the

wind from somewhere has
taken us all for
a wild ride – crossing

a frontier, the new
world coming all at
once upon us …

About the Author

Burt Kimmelman has published four previous collections of poetry — Musaics (1992), First Life (2000), The Pond at Cape May Point (2002), a collaboration with the painter Fred Caruso, and Somehow (2005). For over a decade, he was Senior Editor of Poetry New York: A Journal of Poetry and Translation. He is a professor of English at New Jersey Institute of Technology and the author of two book-length literary studies: The “Winter Mind”: William Bronk and American Letters (1998); and, The Poetics of Authorship in the Later Middle Ages: The Emergence of the Modern Literary Persona (1996, paperback 1999). He also edited The Facts on File Companion to 20th-Century American Poetry (2005).