SKIES OF BLUR

Burrell presents a deeply personal anthology of poetry.

The author explores many themes in this evocative poetry collection, including family, loss, and social issues like mass shootings and Covid-19. Burrell’s strongest pieces touch on human connection and examine how people reconcile their past with their present, as illustrated by the piece “Midlife”: “Everything’s falling fast / like four decades of dominoes lined up / as something shaped like my life.” Much of the work is moving, like “This Is Asteroid Fell Out of the Sky,” which takes the form of a news interview mash-up following the 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas. Burrell’s writing is vividly descriptive in its scene-setting, painting a clear and redolent picture of both the physical surroundings and the emotions contained in the verses, as in “Do Not Drive Into Smoke”: “That house had a cellar, / lightless, dingy, that smelled like pond mud, / like cigarette butts floating in a bucket / of rainwater.” Readers can feel the grief of the speaker in “Unable To Sing.” One of the standout pieces is “Exact Change Pantoum,” another example of the speaker contemplating one’s life and choices: “I followed loss through the forest and crossed fields… / …I had my head / in night clouds, and behind them years, dulled stars, / like spit wads on a blackboard! I wasted all my breath / trying not to lose it….” Burrell’s pieces are sometimes more experimental in their composition, like the aforementioned “This Is Asteroid Fell Out of the Sky” as well as “Blind Spots Hide Motorcycles Look Twice: A Matching Quiz,” in which readers are tasked with matching up opposing statements that are poignant in any configuration they choose.

A stirring and distinctively intimate compilation of poems.