ELYSIAN FOOL

A debut poetry collection that traverses nature, mortality, and the various ways people hurt one another.

Editor and teacher Burinskas draws on her personal experiences, including international travels, to ground this book of 51 poems that explore darker corners of the human psyche. Oscillating between first-, second-, and third-person narrators, the poems quickly reveal their morbid undercurrents; there’s no introduction, so readers are immediately thrust into “Grains of Pearls,” about a woman in emotional crisis, suffering at the hands of a lover: “Her love is eternal, her body ephemeral, / but you seek and find only what you can hold. / The blueprint is broken, obscene, and banal.” The malaise increases from there, as speakers give or receive cruelty. There’s accessible, if vague, darkness in poems that effectively draws from societal and individual dysfunction, such as “Clay Prisons” (“Useless memories taint and turn, / and necessary stomachs churn…We succumb to glasses overflowing / when they’re empty without our knowing”) and “She” (“She cannot bear to see, / yet cannot look away / from life’s tenuous debris”). Some poems adopt a rhyme scheme, such as aba, or have rhyming lines within stanzas, but most have looser forms with short lines. Burinskas occasionally tackles such subject matter as substance abuse and explicit violence; one work ruminates on a brutal rape. Many readers will connect to this book’s difficult themes, and the strongest poems are those in first-person with sparser imagery, which allow readers to enter the speaker’s head and interpret moments without cumbersome description: “One day / You taught me / To open darkness or beer / With fingers positioned / Just below the neck.” However, several works would have benefited from editing or cutting wordy passages that interrupt the rhythm or veer into cliché (“Some days / I miss you / So much it hurts”). There are some curious titles, as well, which seem unrelated to their poem’s content; one work that contemplates death is titled “Penguins Eat Mayonnaise.”

An uneven but intriguingly morose collection that will resonate with many.