Advice from the Lights

As in 2013's Belmont, Burt mines a nearly limitless store of empathy, lending voices to living things and inanimate objects alike, from anxious kites to wrestling ferrets ("Our arguments/ are circular:/ we love to writhe,/ to form a wreath/ or flare and tie/ ourselves in knots"). More than exhibitions of creative ventriloquism, these poems aspire to be lessons toward the realization of personal identity: "The point is to be, in your own eyes, what you are," which in Burt's case is an accomplished poet and critic whose own consciousness gracefully reconciles male (Stephen) and female (Stephanie) gender identities. Among Burt's performative voicings one finds childhood intimations of difference ("Taboos at Twelve"), pop cultural memoirs ("The Cars' Greatest Hits"), and poems spoken in the voice of Stephanie ("What if I had a side you could not see?"), all offering evidence that selfhood and transformation are often inseparable.