Every Crow in a Blue Sky

Narrative verse has found a new voice, a storyteller of verve and brio, recasting the lapidary virtues of the short story into musical lines, new American rhythms and inflections. The tales Burgess Needle tells come from all sides, from his childhood struggle with a casually brutal father, from the Arizona people and landscapes, from the travel experiences of his counter-cultural youth as a wide-eyed TEFL teacher in Thailand. Needle’s poems are technically of great interest: they are more often than not 40+-line blocks, sectioned into units by lineation indents in the William Carlos Williams tradition, with breath breaks in some lines giving syncopation and interlinear emphasis. Burgess Needle’s poems enact many things, but they do this best of all: attend to the trails left behind of human story, re-experiencing their lived presence, and alerting us to their fresh reality under menace of the destruction easing our way.