Let's Become a Ghost Story

Originally from New York City, Rick Bursky now lives in Los Angeles where he works in advertising (a television commercial he wrote appeared on the 2006 Super Bowl and won advertising awards around the world). He also teaches poetry at the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program, and occasionally copywriting at USC. His previous full-length collections are Death Obscura (Sarabande Books 2010), and The Soup of Something Missing (Bear Star Press 2004); and his chapbook, The Invention of Fiction, was published by Hollyridge Press in 2005. He has a BFA from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena and an MFA from Warren Wilson College.

“Rick Bursky’s Let’s Become a Ghost Story is a surrealist’s wet dream, full of crashing chandeliers, stopped clocks, and bodies turned to smoke and ash. Bursky uses these moments of magic to navigate the riskiest corners of the human heart: love, death, grief, and losses that repeat themselves like a spell. As Bursky says, ‘Everything I know about magic / I learned staring at a firing squad.’ In these poems we see that sometimes sorcery is what it takes to face our demons, especially on the unrelenting page.”—Keetje Kuipers“Rick Bursky’s poems are full of good news. It is that poetry still exists.”—Dean Young“In Rick Bursky’s Let’s Become a Ghost Story, the speaker and his lover constantly transform and trade positions: ‘Once, while lying on top of me, she began to tremble, / then shook violently and abruptly stopped, / then floated halfway to the ceiling. / She was playing God, or I was. I don’t remember.’ The outlandish is presented so matter-of-factly that I found myself delightedly half-believing the speaker’s assertion that ‘According to the census I am not the only person / who lists “mailbox” as their occupation.’ Bursky’s surrealism is sensical and grounded in real emotion, which allows these poems to soar.”—Matthea Harvey, author of If the Tabloids Are True What Are You?