Popular Music

In this debut volume, Stephen Burt, in poetic actions that range with unusual ease from prose to sonnets and free verse, explores the sensation of selfhood as it presents itself, in all its fractured parts, for re-formation.

His speaker moves from the longing to 'be someone else' -- to rid himself of every version of his own shadow -- through a multitude of sensations covered by the notion of 'blasphemy' of soul, where words themselves are a source of anxiety, to slow accommodation (especially powerfully rendered as a capacity for dream and the knowledge dream-logic allows) with the Kafkaesque free-form guilt of personhood.

Passionate and deeply accomplished, this is most truly elegant and honest work.