The Improbable Swervings of Atoms

by Christopher Bursk

Book Overview

Winner of the 2004 Donald Hall Prize in Poetry The Improbable Swervings of Atoms follows the comedic, often painful, physical and emotional travails of a young boy growing up in 1950s America. He watches the McCarthy hearings, conquers the Congo, assassinates the president, has his head stuffed into a toilet, drops his uniform on the fifty-yard line, and tries to make sense of Lucretius's De Rerum Natura. The poems engage history in a very intimate...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0822958899
• ISBN13: 9780822958895
• Release Date: August 2005
• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Length: 104 Pages
• Weight: 0.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 6.1" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

Poetry is a good read

I had to buy this book for a class but ended up enjoying and reading the rest for fun. Worth the buy.

Addictive Poetry

While I like to read poetry, I must say that I have never read an entire book of poetry front to back in one or two sittings. That is, until I came across this book. These are poems like none other that I have read. They somehow capture the confusion and exhiliration of growing up in our world that is sometimes sick and sometimes sublime. I love the bravery and vulnerability of the boy that is described in these poems. "How can a boy explain wanting/to taste everything, even the detergents/of his own body: tears, nose drip, sweat of his armpit, salt/of his wrist, skim milk/of his own semen?" Bursk's poems are addictive. You read one and then you must read more.