In this elegant collection, D. Nurkse elegizes a lost father, a foreshortened childhood, and
a young marriage. From the drenched lawns of suburbia to the streets of Brooklyn, he delivers up the small but crucial epiphanies that propel an American coming-of-age and chronicles the development of a tender yet exacting consciousness. As the diversions of childhood prefigure the heartbreak of adulthood, Nurkse captures the exquisite sadness of each small fall that carries us further from our early innocence. In the book s final section, the poet turns to face mortality with a series of...

D. Nurkse s Burnt Island explores tragedy both grand and intimate, in city and country, in our own troubled moment and across the greater scope of geological time. Arranged in three suites of lucid, often heart-wrenching verse, the book begins with a city under siege, in a group of poems that becomes a subtle homage to New York after 9/11 a metaphorical burnt island, where diggers doze on their shovels, citizens contribute bottles of water, M&M s, and casseroles to recovery efforts, and survivors, mesmerized by the photos of the missing, compare them scar by scar with the faces of the...