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Christopher Burawa

The Small Mystery of Lapses (CSU Poetry) (CSU Poetry) (CSU Poetry) Paperback – March 6, 2006

by Christopher Burawa (Author)

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Original poems by Chrisopher Burawa, The Small Mystery of Lapses is the winner of the 2005 Cleveland State University Poetry Center first book prize, selected by Beckian Fritz Goldberg.

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Editorial Reviews

Review

"In the richly detailed poems of Christopher Burawa's first collection, The Small Mystery of Lapses, the narrative inclination of a fabulist is the accelerant that fuels a remarkable and incandescent imagination. Burawa leads us deftly and confidently in his poems from the familiar to the strange without provoking estrangement. For in a Burawa poem we have no doubt that when '[m]oths wake up,' they 'mistake the blue milk in the buckets/ for starlight.' The Small Mystery of Lapses marks the fresh and energetic appearence of a promising poet." --Michael Collier

"In these spectacular first poems by Christopher Burawa, I begin to hallucinate the characters in a kind of pantomime that has in the past distinguished writers such as Jospeh Conrad; there is Geppetto's paste pot and the shiny foil of a local apocalypse, ghosts of Stalinists with spears of dried cod flaming up behind them on a pier in Iceland, and then the harlequins of a first-person narrative that crosses the river or doesn't. Melodious and irritable, aspiring and brooding, I mean to say, these are poems from one of the most brilliant first books of a new millenium." --Norman Dubie

"Christopher Burawa gives shape to the mysterious with images that are surprising and transformative: 'As luck has it, / I'm sitting in the clover, staring at her / with all the eyes grown out of my loneliness.' Burawa's voice so effortlessly interweaves experience and imagination that we do not feel like readers so much as lucky inhabitants of the world he creates. Here is the smell of earth, an acute sense of the landscapes we carry in us, the fragility of history, an alchemy of wonder and loss, ' the bordering trees [waving] // like confirmed bachelors without curtains.' By turns lyrical, meditative, slyly surreal, Burrawa is a poet of astonishing presence and originality." --Beckian Fritz Goldberg

About the Author

Christopher Burawa was born in Reykjavik, Iceland. He holds an M.A. in English Language & Literature and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Arizona State University. He was awarded a MacDowell Colony fellowship in 2003. His translations of the contemporary Icelandic poet, Jóhann Hjálmarsson, Of the Same Mind , won the Toad Press International Chapbook Competition and was published in summer 2005. Currently, he is the Director of Literature and Public Information Officer for the Arizona Commission on the Arts.

Product details

Publisher : Cleveland State University Poetry Center (March 6, 2006)
Language: : English
Paperback : 96 pages
ISBN-10 : 1880834685
ISBN-13 : 978-1880834688
Item Weight : 5.6 ounces

Best Sellers Rank: #12,160,464 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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The Small Mystery of Lapses

Reviewed in the United States on November 29, 2014

Burawa’s collection occurs over the landscape of war, life, religion, death and history. Adding to that mélange of familiar, abstract and grandiose subjects is Burawa’s talent for the surreal and intimately personal. Even as I admit I often feel foreign to the geography and culture Burawa’s poems explore, I think I feel something true and authentic where Burawa asks me (the reader) to imagine and where he writes a “you.” I walk (read) eagerly along the journey Burawa takes me. Where I don’t understand, I certainly want to, and I think that’s a great achievement.

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Delightfully Unpredictable

Reviewed in the United States on April 1, 2009

Delightfully unpredictable poems: you think you know where you're going, and then you're not exactly where you thought you were, but Burawa keeps you deeply interested in the journey. Cagey poems, not like anyone else's.

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