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Burnside Soleil @burnsidesoleil.bsky.social · 20/03/2026

I am reading one of the finest novels I will ever read, and it’s called Light Years. The writer is incomparable, James Salter.

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Reposted by Burnside Soleil

Southern 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.com

Fabulist and Sincere: Burnside Soleil’s “Berceuse Parish”

A review of Burnside Soleil’s debut poetry collection, “Berceuse Parish.”

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Burnside Soleil @burnsidesoleil.bsky.social · 22/02/2026

Grateful 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.

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Burnside Soleil @burnsidesoleil.bsky.social · 22/02/2026

Maybe this is symptomatic of elderly millennial energy, but I can no longer write or focus in a coffee shop.

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Reposted by Burnside Soleil

Kimberly Wolf @kimberlywolf.bsky.social · 13/01/2026

I 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.

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Burnside Soleil @burnsidesoleil.bsky.social · 18/12/2025

Funny to see some hometown folks quibble about my first book.

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Burnside Soleil @burnsidesoleil.bsky.social · 15/11/2025

That last line, in particular. Congratulations on the publication!

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Burnside Soleil @burnsidesoleil.bsky.social · 12/03/2025

This interview was really fun. Thanks both to Tiana and NER.

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Burnside Soleil @burnsidesoleil.bsky.social · 05/03/2025

Author’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.

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Burnside Soleil @burnsidesoleil.bsky.social · 28/02/2025

These are landscapes—are they landscapes? An extraordinary collection of interiors.

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Burnside Soleil @burnsidesoleil.bsky.social · 28/02/2025

His final lines really fascinate me. They’re wry; other times, mysterious. Never opaque. But even as he “completes” the poem, the irony pushes back against the very idea of completion. He must end the lyric. He mistrusts ending anything.

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Burnside Soleil @burnsidesoleil.bsky.social · 28/02/2025

Truly, poem after poem, the best. Adventurous. Funny as hell. Raw yet such beautiful music. If he’s considered a regionalist, in a way to contain or diminish, then the critic’s attitude is provincial, not the poems.

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Burnside Soleil @burnsidesoleil.bsky.social · 28/02/2025

Donald 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.

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Burnside Soleil @burnsidesoleil.bsky.social · 16/02/2025

And I like readings of a poem that are unafraid to be inconclusive, ending with a gesture to keep thinking and feeling with a lyric.

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Burnside Soleil @burnsidesoleil.bsky.social · 16/02/2025

I like that one old etymology of “understand”: “to stand in the midst of.”

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Burnside Soleil @burnsidesoleil.bsky.social · 16/02/2025

A poem asks for attention, not complete knowledge, from a reader.

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Burnside Soleil @burnsidesoleil.bsky.social · 26/01/2025

Not a critique of him. But I’m also fascinated by different endings—fascinated by poems that open rather than close. You don’t sense the boundary. You have to reread the same poem after the final lines, which create a new poem. Each time, a new poem.

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Burnside Soleil @burnsidesoleil.bsky.social · 26/01/2025

This 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.

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Burnside Soleil @burnsidesoleil.bsky.social · 14/01/2025

Also, traditional forms and free verse are interdependent, a tension that gives each meaning, music, and legibility in our culture. I think some of the most interesting poems enact this tension, working in multiple registers and traditions.

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Burnside Soleil @burnsidesoleil.bsky.social · 14/01/2025

From 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?

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Burnside Soleil @burnsidesoleil.bsky.social · 08/01/2025

I 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.

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Burnside Soleil @burnsidesoleil.bsky.social · 08/01/2025

Rather than vivid depictions of beauty and the internal life, River depicts obsolescence.

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Burnside Soleil @burnsidesoleil.bsky.social · 08/01/2025

The poems are light, lean at times, unencumbered by overwrought syntax. The Branch Will Not Break is epiphanic—you can feel the poems open. But in River, it’s almost like a single undifferentiated bleak poem that never transforms.

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Burnside Soleil @burnsidesoleil.bsky.social · 08/01/2025

James 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.

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