I'm No Longer Troubled by the Extravagance

(Paperback)

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I'm No Longer Troubled by the Extravagance is a collection of poems that assign new meanings to the people and things of the past. The book moves in three sections through a fantastic landscape that maps human fragility. The poems in the first section speak to matters of the heartintimacy and losspunctuated by lovers who leave. The second section is comprised of prose poems chronicling misadventures and conspiracies: Russian spies on Wilshire Boulevard, artichokes that mate for life, and secret photographs of God. Finally, the third section pans out from individual experience, hosting the collective in fable-like reflections. Together, the poems in Extravagance mark with fragile acceptance the surreal extravagance of being alive.

The Relentless

One day we'll know how long
the dead have to be dead
before they feel hunger.
One day it'll be summer forever.
In the meantime, the weather,
looking for its cue, keeps an eye on me;
and I keep whatever money's in my pocket
crumpled in a ball. A relentless
responsibility dogs me, and the funny thing
is, these are the lyrics to a happy song.
Go ahead, tap your foot,
snap your fingers.
We're roasting a pig in the yard.

Rick Bursky is the author of Death Obscura (Sarabande Books, 2010) and The Soup of Something Missing (Bear Star Press, 2004), winner of the Dorothy Brunsman Poetry Prize. He lives in Los Angeles where he works in advertising and teaches poetry in the UCLA Extension Writer's Program.

Reviews

"Bursky's collection of poems, titled I'm No Longer Troubled by the Extravagance, kept me moving in all sorts of directions. His facile accession of language, banal if used unequivocally, is an exploitation of eccentricities sprinkled with the right dose of humility and charm." -Heath Bowen, New Pages "Rick Bursky's breezy, surreal narratives are bristling with a 'Qui vive' alertness to the pedestrian world and its aftershocks all the way to eternity. I'm wonderfully troubled by these poems, their extravagances and great diversions through which we often plunge recklessly toward truth and all perils of the heart: 'Love without fear is meaningless, it's a machine / like grief, always in the early stages of invention.'" -Mark Irwin "Rick Bursky is blessed with a complicated and eccentric imagination, and the ability to write pellucidly uncomplicated sentences. These gifts are joined together in his new book I'm No Longer Troubled by the Extravagance where each poem is startling in its strangeness and weird beauty. Other gifts are Bursky's constant ability to surprise, as well as his ability to create an amalgam of the serious, comic, and fantastic, turning many of his poems into delirious journeys. The book is a pleasure to read." -Stephen Dobyns

Author Bio

Rick Bursky is the author of Death Obscura (Sarabande, 2010); The Soup of Something Missing (Bear Star Press, 2004), winner of the Dorothy Brunsmen Poetry Prize; and the chapbook, The Invention of Fiction (Hollyridge Press, 2005). He received his BFA from Art Center College of Design, and an MFA from Warren Wilson College. His work appears widely in such places as American Poetry Review, The Pinch, Gettysburg Review, Sycamore Review, Copper Nickle, Antioch Review, Laurel Review, Hotel Amerika, Southern Review, Conduit, Field, Iowa Review, and The Journal, among many others. Bursky currently lives in Los Angeles where he works in advertising and teaches poetry in the UCLA Extension Writer's Program.