Burnside Soleil @burnsidesoleil.bsky.social · 20/03/2026I am reading one of the finest novels I will ever read, and it’s called Light Years. The writer is incomparable, James Salter. 010
Reposted by Burnside SoleilSouthern Review of Books @southrevbooks.bsky.social · 06/03/2026"Berceuse Parish is equally fabulist and sincere, a rare combination. ...a book that is consistent in its experiments, committed to beauty, and interested in a multitudinous way of being in the world." New review of BERCEUSE PARISH by Burnside Soleil.southernreviewofbooks.comFabulist and Sincere: Burnside Soleil’s “Berceuse Parish”A review of Burnside Soleil’s debut poetry collection, “Berceuse Parish.” 031
Burnside Soleil @burnsidesoleil.bsky.social · 22/02/2026Grateful for this new review of my book. I have learned that my tactic for reading reviews of Berceuse is pretty much holding my breath and scanning quickly before settling in to admire someone who writes so attentively and insightfully. 021
Burnside Soleil @burnsidesoleil.bsky.social · 22/02/2026Maybe this is symptomatic of elderly millennial energy, but I can no longer write or focus in a coffee shop. 010
Reposted by Burnside SoleilKimberly Wolf @kimberlywolf.bsky.social · 13/01/2026I just finished an early copy I received of this book and you absolutely need to read it. It’s available for pre-order and I promise you will love it. I will be thinking about and returning to this collection a lot. 021
Reposted by Burnside SoleilLit Hub @literaryhub.bsky.social · 20/02/2026@burnsidesoleil.bsky.social on living with his characters and finding his narrator.buff.lyHow Finding My Narrator Brought My Entire Book TogetherMy first night in the apartment where I’d moved after my marriage ended, I listened to my upstairs neighbor, a horticulturalist, dragging huge potted plants from one corner of her room to another. … 082
Burnside Soleil @burnsidesoleil.bsky.social · 18/12/2025Funny to see some hometown folks quibble about my first book. 020
Burnside Soleil @burnsidesoleil.bsky.social · 12/03/2025This interview was really fun. Thanks both to Tiana and NER. 041
Burnside Soleil @burnsidesoleil.bsky.social · 05/03/2025Author’s notes? Often, the poems, I believe, would be improved, richer, if the lyric wrestled with the context appended in the book. Also, these poems are sometimes so slight, a few clever rhetorical maneuvers, but emotionally distant. Instead, incorporate the notes. Let us read the burden. 010
Burnside Soleil @burnsidesoleil.bsky.social · 28/02/2025These are landscapes—are they landscapes? An extraordinary collection of interiors. 010
Burnside Soleil @burnsidesoleil.bsky.social · 28/02/2025Donald Hall said you judge a poet only by their best works. If that’s true, then Rodney Jones is one of the finest American poets. I don’t think the man has written a dull line, each collection and each poem charged, funny, and expansive in its imagination and tenderness. 200
Burnside Soleil @burnsidesoleil.bsky.social · 16/02/2025A poem asks for attention, not complete knowledge, from a reader. 150
Burnside Soleil @burnsidesoleil.bsky.social · 26/01/2025This observation is too niche, useless, but in Donkey Gospel, Hoagland’s poems have the most interesting thinking in the second third. He prefers the neat, witty closing that he pulls off incredibly well. But the second third—compelled by the wondering and speculations there. 130
Burnside Soleil @burnsidesoleil.bsky.social · 14/01/2025From Hass, I’ve learned that you can cultivate an overdetermined deep image, surrealistic and surprising, but if the rhythm of the line is just iambic, then are you really pushing the language forward? 130
Burnside Soleil @burnsidesoleil.bsky.social · 08/01/2025I see many poems scattering lines across the page, space between one phrase or clause, which isn’t good or bad, or preferable or gauche, but when the syntax and the image don’t evoke striking musicality, the poem lacks tension, seems airy. Not that the form needs conflict. But maybe tension. 010
Burnside Soleil @burnsidesoleil.bsky.social · 08/01/2025James Wright’s Shall We Gather at the River’s desolate atmosphere and dispossessed archetypal characters can seem like sentimentalized squalor, but the lines aren’t pathetic, even as the subjects are full of pathos. 120