White Door

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Advance praise for White Door:

From the first astonishing poem of White Door you can feel it—the stitching together of separated things, the line pulling away from the sentence and then hard-threaded back at stanza’s end, the then pulling away from the now, the child from the mother, frayed, and then hand-sewn back. Burgi Zenhaeusern’s language is stitch-work, textile, sensory, but the kind of sensory that begins to lean figurative, to mean more than it says. The I can be “light forced through / split clouds,” or “my shiny coin” can be “falling into the empty well of me—its bright ping,” the sun can be a she, “her mouth a white-hot hole,” fear can be “packed like old snow.” When I look up after disappearing into the careful weave of these poems, I am amazed to find how far moved I am from where I started, how completely everything behind me has changed in the new light.

—Kathryn Cowles, author of Maps and Transcripts of the Ordinary World

Framed by the tender ordinary, by branches through the kitchen window, by generational memory and a grandfather’s painted Alpine meadow, Burgi Zenhaeusern’s White Door asks the central question of poetry: “How long / can you continue without yearning?” Simone Weil wrote that unmixed attention is prayer, and this collection streams with the light of attention and language that feels to me holy.

—Han VanderHart, author of Larks

In White Door, Burgi Zenhaeusern circles back again and again to necessary, enduring questions—how to care for each other, what home is—refusing to settle for anything less than the real. Despite the way exploration tends to “re-etch longing,” despite the complexities of language and being, these poems do not give up their hunger to understand. Intelligence and integrity shine through them.

—Kasey Jueds, author of The Thicket

Two poems featured in White Door:

morning swim in Moist Poetry Journal

Two-legged Sunna in Glass: a Journal of Poetry

 

 

Behind Normalcy

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Advance praise for Behind Normalcy:

“Behind Normalcy is an opportunity to explore the tense and probing questions we hide behind and hide from in polite society. From the juxtaposition of sending a child off to school as a photographer’s death makes front page news, to the great aunt the poet knows best by her handmade socks, Burgi Zenhaeusern has the patience and the eye to peel back the layers of everyday and reveal the small truths lying beneath. In [after days of sun gray] she writes,

sometimes you don’t
see what is
rearing up to speak
from you
until you say it

I am glad she is saying it. In succinct, pure lines, she documents the quiet beauty of this fragmented and complex world.”

— Teri Ellen Cross Davis, author of Haint

“‘I’m pilfering anything,’ confesses the speaker in Burgi Zenhaeusern’s Behind Normalcy, and it’s true. These poems shimmer with the commonplace—an apple shifting in the bowl, a rubber glove, the bus stop, a plastic shopping bag blown in the wind, our endless wars. In these pages are ordinary moments made to gleam by the poet’s clean attention, formal daring, and quietly startling images. Moments made to gleam by the poet’s zigzag through the day, through memory and the natural world, through the ‘blinding dimness,’ to remind us that the ordinary is only ordinary if we don’t look closely. Come to these poems and let them soothe the blur of days. Let them show you where and why and how ‘the shimmer keeps beckoning.’”

— Molly Spencer, author of If the House

“With a keen eye for detail and deft use of form, Zenhaeusern writes lovely narratives and lyrics drawing our attention to the urgency of both grief and hope. This is a wonderful collection.”

— Erica Dawson, author of When Rap Spoke Straight to God

Two poems featured in Behind Normalcy:

Play around with border/s , a guest poem on poet/multi-talent Henry Crawford’s website

Listen to the poet Heathen Derr read Rubber Glove. The reading is part of Heathen’s Cuvaj Se/Take Care Border Protest Reading Series