Books
Every Wrong Direction (poetry & prose)
Every Wrong Direction recreates and dissects the bitter education of Dan Burt, an American emigré who never found a home in America. It begins in the row homes of Jewish immigrants and working-class Italians on the mean streets of 1950s South Philadelphia. [Read more ...]
A History (poetry)
A History is an elegiac 10-poem sequence, written about and in memory of Jill Robinson, a vital and continual presence in the poet’s life for almost seven decades, until her death from cancer in 2018. [Read more ...]
Salvage at Twilight (poetry & prose)
The poet - a man of the world in the widest sense - reflects and in reflection relives the intense experiences that shaped him and that have shaped our modern world. [Read more ...]
You Think It Strange (prose)
Lust and rage beset his every age. His fists rose at the slightest provocation against all comers and sometimes against me. Bullies and every form of authority were his favoured targets. A local teenager who had been tormenting him when he was ten was struck from behind with a lead pipe one winter night. When he came to in hospital several hours and sixteen stitches later, he could recall only that he was passing the Borts’ house when something hit him. He gave little Joey no more trouble. [Read more ...]
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We Look Like This(poetry & prose)
We Look Like This anatomizes history, violence, power, lust and mortality at work on us. Burt's formal, muscular language evokes war, want, cruelty and hope, and a childhood among 'tough Jews' in Philadelphia, dominated by his father Joe, son of Ukrainian immigrants, butcher, boxer and, last, costal fisherman. [Read more ...]
Certain Windows(poetry & prose)
Certain Windows is Dan Burt's second chapbook collection. It includes poems, sequences and the title prose, a vivid memoir evoking a harsh formative world. Among others, the poet's father comes alive here and in the poems, a powerful, hard and sympathetic figure with the wisdom of the man of action. [Read more ...]
Cold Eye(poetry & images)
Cold Eye is a collaboration between Dan Burt and the artist Paul Hodgson. Paul Hodgson read Dan Burt's poems shortly after Lintott Press published some of them. The artist called, and asked whether the poet would like to collaborate on a book. After discussing it, both thought the project might be worthwile.[Read more ...]
Searched For Text(poetry)
Searched for Text is Dan Burt's first chapbook collection of poems. He challenges the traditional form of writing, finding ways of expressing themes that are intensely real and many-layered in time, culture and society. His elegies, poems of love and landscape, are uneasily sharp and political. He allows no sentimentality to blur the deep sentiment of his experiences: [Read more ...]
