Past Continuous

In plain-spoken, lyrical verse infused with unwavering personal reflection, this absorbing first collection from Brian Burt explores poetry's great concerns-death, love, regret, grief, memory, and, above all, language itself: "It's inflection / that we understand, not meaning." The poems in Past Continuous probe the myriad points where landscape and memory, language and history, collide, summoning our deepest interiors. Burt's poems transport us from the farmlands of the American Midwest, to the Rhine valley in Germany, to rural New England, with quiet assurance, clarity, and compassion.