Chris Bursk
Chris Bursk’s poetry was first published in The Sun in 1977. He was a teacher at Bucks Community College and the author of sixteen books of poetry, including With Aeneas in a Time of Plague, which was published in July. He lived in Langhorne Manor, Pennsylvania, and died on June 21, 2021, at the age of seventy-eight.
— From September 2021A Tribute To Chris Bursk
The selection that follows — just a small sample of the fifty-plus poems of his that have appeared in The Sun — display the heart and honesty that first drew us to Chris’s work in 1977. A self-described “compulsive writer,” Chris once said, “I do not wait for inspiration. . . . Some days I watch the page until a few words come — and then I find myself inside the world they invite me into.” That world will be missed.
September 2021Last Writes
My friend possessed the inclination and the ability to turn her experience of the world into a language that insisted on delighting in itself.
June 2020More Reasons You’re Thinking Of Killing Yourself
Because it’s embarrassing how many poems you’ve written / about killing yourself.
October 2015Unselected Poems
You’ve published enough books, old man. / Let someone else have a turn. / The letter doesn’t say that, / but it might as well.
January 2014
Has something we published moved you? Fired you up? Did we miss the mark? Send A Letter