I Am So Calm by Alice Burdick | The Miramichi Reader

I Am So Calm by Alice Burdick (above/ground press, 2025) is the latest from a poet who has been putting out surreal books since at least 2002. Her most recent full collection is Ox Lost, Snow Deep (A Feed Dog book/Anvil Press, 2024).

From what I’ve read this chapbook seems consistent in style, although I won’t offer a title by title comparison. I Am So Calm sets mid-field in surreal. The poems feel like disorienting lists of non-sequiturs or axiomatic koans. That said, “non-sequitur” presumes one thing should follow from the previous when that sort of linkages is a construct and her objects and awarenesses are discrete and independent, explicitly “a tapas of small moments.” (p. 17). Line progressions outright refuse cis-het military industrial late-capitalist hierarchical culture of How Sense is Conveyed.

Grounding phrases break in and flit away. Marginalia is welcomed into the body. What does it matter for, as she concludes with admission of ephemerality of both grief and grace, “Our bodies take everything in, then dispose/ of the everything, gradually.”

Rather than staid and proper it’s vivid and irreverent urging to live, live, live

Because the sentences and semantics in each line are simple, short and small it seems to instruct the reader to move quickly, but the collective run of sentences confound a quick reading. How does anything fit? One needs to squint or look at middle distance to not see so literally a pattern or progression. We get permission to not have authorial authority over all we see, whether we read of speak. See the foci captures chosen in the last fifth of “The Bed Book”, (p. 14-15)

Floorboards creak, heels of a bouncing child  
smash down from above. That  
was a successful quesadilla.  
I like the idea of beginning  
in the middle. Then please,  
don’t worry about the fog.  
Aureola? Or corona?  
What is the light  
that carries us all?  
What is the light that embalms?

It is the barely differentiated everything, the chaotic flourishing that carries us, illuminates us, not the still profundity of interstitial reflection. Rather than staid and proper it’s vivid and irreverent urging to live, live, live, “bounce meaty bellies off each other, dance.” (p. 20)

In “A Real Success”, Burdick writes, “To not speak is to succeed” and continues,

"Let concerts happen with more air  
about them. The audience  
a required entity."

It echoes the absurdist play In Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead by Tom Stoppard (Grove Weldenfeld, 1967) when the Player said, “the single assumption that makes our existence viable— that somebody is watching…every gesture and pose vanishing into the thin unpopulated air. We ransomed our dignity to the clouds.” What matters is the sharing, the joining of focus, not the containing, elevating and perfecting on plinths a historically inaccurate construction of calm order. If the poetry were to have a theme song it might be “Chicks Dig It”, (“pain hurts, but only for a minute. All you’re left is with the memories you made. Life is short. Best live it.” I hope I’m nailing that and not paraphrasing).

It may be a different form but as with artistic expression, it wrestles with how to live well. Towards the last 10% of “If you do this, honour will result” we have an index of values of sorts:

"...We’re all  
just doing the best we can. Graft a tree onto another tree,  
a wedge to reanimate flowers. Shelter your loved ones’ bodies  
and listen when they tell you who they are, what makes them  
feel safe, what they need, what they notice. Instruct destruction  
to fold its retractable blade. Hold me, my own arms.  
Upend honour and drain the rigid globules."

Destruction as a switchblade, grafting to another as resurrection to blooms, flush the parts that clot your flow. Yet said fresh and to be confoundingly slow so it can’t be quickly glossed over. There is something toward a profound lesson and closure at the end of poems and something of a flotsam, jetsam swirl around a theme that prevents it from being random and more towards bastard ghazal. It is a hyperactive sort of mind but one that insists on kindness and accepting in what is and asks what could be if we think without the usual blinders, partitions, rules and boundaries?

Alice Burdick writes poetry, essays, and cookbooks in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia. She is the author most recently of Ox Lost, Snow Deep (a feed dog book/Anvil Press), and of Deportment, 2018, Wilfrid Laurier University Press, Book of Short Sentences, 2016, Mansfield Press, Holler, 2012, Mansfield Press, Flutter, 2008, Mansfield Press, and Simple Master, 2002, Pedlar Press. Her practice often includes collaboration, and recently her poetry has been used in Woodlight, a series of three films created by Hear Here and Erin Donovan. Her poems have appeared in Aubade: Poetry and Prose from Nova Scotian Writers (Boularderie Island Press, 2018), GUSH: Menstrual Manifestos for Our Time (Frontenac House, 2018), Surreal Estate: 13 Canadian Poets Under the Influence, An Anthology of Surrealist Canadian Poetry (The Mercury Press, Fall 2004), as well as other anthologies. She is the author of many chapbooks, folios, and broadsides since 1991. Her essays have appeared in Locations of Grief: an emotional geography (Wolsak & Wynn, 2020) and My Nova Scotia Home: Nova Scotia’s best writers riff on the place they call home (MacIntyre Purcell Publishing Inc., 2019). She has authored three cookbooks for local publisher Formac Publishing. From 1992-1995, Alice was assistant coordinator of the Toronto Small Press Fair, and has been a judge for various awards, including the bpNichol Chapbook Award. She is also a freelance editor, manuscript assessor, and workshop leader.

Publisher: above/ground press (January 8th, 2025)
Chapbook

Pearl Pirie

Website

Pearl Pirie's latest is we astronauts (Pinhole Press, 2025). Pirie’s 4th poetry collection is footlights (Radiant Press, 2020). rain’s small gestures(Apt 9 Press, 2021) won the 2022 Nelson Ball Prize. www.pearlpirie.com and patreon.com/pearlpiriepoet