Ovid at Fifteen

Christopher Bursk’s latest collection is not just profoundly honest; it is profoundly brave. These astonishing poems explore the space between sensuality, sexuality, and love—a landscape in which flawed human beings give birth to the flawed human beings who will one day take care of them, each generation screwing up even as it adds to the universal fund of beauty and compassion. Above all, Ovid at Fifteen reminds us what it means to feel the wonder of life too keenly—to “want to throw yourself / off the cliff, plunge / into the very heart of color.” If Bursk’s ordinary yet mythic heroes hold back, they do so not out of cowardice but because they remember what happened to Icarus. And so they watch, and dream, and feel, and thus “make a living / out of aching . . .” The greatness of this book lies in its immortalizing that ache, that delicious pain.