Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. Fourteen poems and an essay from Burt take on, take in, and take up the teams and the games of the Women's National Basketball Assocation, or WNBA. The poems—some in rhyming forms, some in slippery new ones—encompass word games, in-jokes, on-court moves and countermoves, and serious speculation on the enduring subjects of lyric poetry: love, fame, competition, solitude, obscure heroism, nostalgia, anger, longing, blocked shots, and the value of a well-thrown entry pass. The essay (first published in The Believer) looks at the mindset of one committed fan along with the past andfuture of the still-growing league.
I write books about poetry, essays on other people's poems, books of my own poems, and shorter pieces about poems, poets, poetry, comics, science-fiction writers, political controversies, obscure pop groups, and the WNBA. My writing has appeared in the New York Times, the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, the Believer, the Boston Review, and as part of the Songs from Scratch experiment at Minnesota Public Radio.
I am a Professor of English at Harvard University. Prior to joining the faculty at Harvard, I spent several years at Macalester College, first as an Assistant Professor, then as an Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of English. I received my Ph.D. in English from Yale University in 2000, my A.B. from Harvard in 1994.
