If A Fish

Full Length collection of poetry by George Burns.Poet George Burns embodies what Emily Dickinson at fifty believed that Great Hungers feed themselves. If poetic urgency becomes the blessing of bees in your love affairs and a broken water wheel / abandoned in its stony stream then it is also those great mysteries moving us forward toward the gladly unanswered If... If A Fish is an ignited testimony to a writer wholly alive in his life --and this life on the page feels as kaleidoscopic and passionate as languages fireflies / blossoming in a field before us. Take the very flesh of it with you on your next voyage home into the heart the start of it all.Elena Karina Byrne author of If This Makes You NervousIn If a Fish George Burns lands with delicate intensity in moments of pain redemption and unflinching honesty in this collection of poems that serve as lyrical memoir. These poems turn us in the end toward a well-earned wisdom.River Elizabeth Hall High Shelf PressGeorge Burns is the most natural of poets. We experience his poetic voice as a deep personal conversation in the American vernacular that Williams told us to write in. Underneath this apparent artlessness there is a subtle and powerful artfulness-each word is perfectly chosen absolutely right for the poem. In this new profound and generous collection Burns engages those things in life that engage us all-family and childhood (in all of their complexity) the various moments that make up a life the beauties and the solitude of nature the tenderness of intimacy and much more. We find a rare careful honesty in these poems a desire to tell the truth the whole truth and only the truth. This is a beautiful collection a book to read and reread many times.Edward Smallfield author of The Pleasures of C equinox and to whom it may concern