Reviews

Advice from the Lights by Stephen Burt

wtfisapoet's review

Burt's use of traditional form throughout this collection is playful but at times too noticeable. While recognizing a rhyme scheme may open the reader to how a poem sits within poetic traditions and history, for some it can pull them completely out from the poem's movement. The standouts in this book are poems like Hermit Crab. The poems where the speaker is completely what the poem suggests however, there is a sense of excess where the poem appears to suggesting a speaker that is not the animal or object in question. For these poems aforementioned I will have to return to this text. They are simply magical. The book itself has a feel of several chapbooks put together to form a whole. I am looking forward to seeing a more cohesive project from Burt in my future reading which mean obviously that there will be reading in future.

jennvreads's review

3.0

I don't necessarily think it was a bad book. I just think that I don't gravitate towards books of poetry. It was beautifully written individually, but I just couldn't get into it as a whole.

jeeleongkoh's review

5.0

Stephen (also Stephanie) Burt has made girlhood her territory, not looked back upon in nostalgia or regret, but as it is happening. Attacking it with memories, real and imagined, and with poems written after Callimachus and Baudelaire, she treats it appropriately with seriousness and artistry. Advice from the Lights is a fantastic feat of recall and imagination, rendered in language alive to its own possibilities.