Entire Dilemma

Entire Dilemma is Michael Burkhard's seventh collection of poetry and his first book since W.W. Norton published My Secret Boat (A Notebook of Prose and Poems) in 1990. He has received a Whiting Writers' Award, the Poetry Society of America's Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, and two grants from both the New York State Foundation for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. He has taught at various colleges and universities, most recently the University of Louisville, LeMoyne College, and Syracuse University. During the 1990s, he has also worked as an alcoholism counselor, particularly with children whose lives have been impacted by alcoholism."On rare occasions one comes across an artist whose work feels truly haunted, as mysterious and resonant as the landscape or the constantly shifting reality of our dreams. . . . Michael Burkard's poetry presents a kaleidoscopic and rigorously self-reflective vision, encompassing at once a great tenderness for the world and an uneasiness with the surfaces to which we cling. . . . In a time of far too much cleverness and cacophony, Entire Dilemma serves as a touchstone, an indispensable reminder of just how quiet and redemptive poetry can be."-Provincetown Arts"Burkard's poems are lit from within, radiant but disturbing. . . . Entire Dilemma exists . . . where complex hope, via poetic creation, defeats simple spiritual estrangement."-The Gettysburg Review"Burkard's new book stands as an antidote to the fashionable but spiritually unambitious work that passes for publishable poetry now flooding the literary marketplace. Burkard returns us to a primary strangeness. . . . [He] is invested in a metaphysics of relationship, probing into how we treat each other (and hence ourselves). . . . His is an honest introspection mapping out hearts that ever slide."-Harvard Review"Entire Dilemma is Michael Burkard's first book since 1990's My Secret Boat (A Notebook of Prose and Poems), and it is, in my mind, the most coherent of his collections. . . . The earlier work sings to and from what could be called 'American surrealism' (Williams and Stevens, Tate and Knott), with strains of Kafka, Babel, and Borges providing th