In his sixth collection of poetry, Entire Dilemma, Michael Burkard considers not only the life he has lived but also the many lives he has not lived, a range of might-have-beens, of alternative lives in parallel universes.

Even as he acknowledges the limits of ordinary and actual experience, Burkard delivers what human communities have always asked of their poets and poems: wonder and song. "[G]iven one's powerlessness," Burkard ponders whether "it isn't so far/fetched" to wish to "possess/a slightly other-than human//magic."

Burkard's poems work, at a subconscious level, to awaken us from the narcolepsy of everyday life to reach for the dream beyond. From a dreamer's vantage point, they envision life, death, love, recovery, earth, and the cosmos. As "contemplations of Being," these poems satisfy the poet's central responsibility, as phrased by Milosz.

Like the moon that illuminates the book's central paradox of human connection and alienation, Burkard's "I" is a symbolic self whose particular experience will not be mined for pain nor mired in autobiography. Instead, Burkard's self functions as a kind of radar eye that locates human experience in its particular incidence.

That Burkard is able to occupy what has been described as "Negative Capability" is both challenge and consolation to any reader who feels and thinks and dreams and, in the final analysis, who arrives at the considered position with which the volume opens: "Fred,/I don't know what to do."

In plain language that resists both arcane and slang diction, Burkard is brilliantly original in terms of syntax, image, and flexibility of line. Entire Dilemma addresses everyday life: the people we know and those we don't; working for a living; death; alcoholism and sobriety; isolation and community. After the smoke and dust clear from the "canon wars," and when the dramatic, but essentially specious oppositions of poetry "schools" have run their course, Michael Burkard will be seen as a central and essential poet of our time.

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A Kiss and a Star

When I am vulnerable
I am again standing
in the cafeteria, next
to Grace, attempting
to be comfortable
among strangers of
a different ilk: but

I slip and kiss her
face without the proper
invitation. And the
silence is so loud
inside my head that
even across the years
I wonder what was

I doing, or trying
to do—was this kiss
a blessing or a curse—
or a blank—a blank
star?—a star which
breathes, at last?—
at last?

Blurbs

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"A hypnotically beautiful book of poems."

—George Saunders, Harper's Bazaar

"Only a handful of poets live on the earth at any given time, and I believe Michael Burkard to be one of them. What a joy—and how humbling—to be confronted by an artist who has utterly abandoned himself to beauty and truth."

—Denis Johnson

"These poems give you the ease of eloquence, confidence that the center will hold, but then danger appears, and suddenly you're elsewhere—the poem has transported you, reconstructed you, without losing a molecule of integrity or verisimilitude. Entire Dilemma . . . allows readers to find revelations in its archetypal images, from soundless bells to infinite railroad cars. These don't make us feel safe, but they do make us feel alive."

—Rain Taxi

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