Parallel Play

by Stephen Burt

The eagerly anticipated second collection by poet and esteemed critic Stephen Burt

Flaunting your useless knowledge has failed you again,
Though it was all they had taught you.
—from "Like a Wreck"

Consult any childhood development guide and you'll find the term "parallel play": when children under two are placed together, they'll play separately but won't interact. They are more fascinated with their immediate surroundings than with each other.

Stephen Burt's second collection of poems, Parallel Play, describes lovers, friends, travelers, and revelers attempting lives dependent on each other but still pulled inevitably into preoccupations of their own self-awareness. When there are many obstacles—overeducation, narcissism, extended adolescence, nomadic existence—how can Americans crawl out of the nursery and coexist if they increasingly have to learn to do so as adults?

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Paperback

First published January 24, 2006

About the author

I write books about poetry, essays on other people’s poems, books of my own poems, and shorter pieces about poems, poets, poetry, comics, science-fiction writers, political controversies, obscure pop groups, and the WNBA.

My published books are: Close Calls With Nonsense: Reading New Poetry (Graywolf, Spring 2009), The Forms of Youth: Adolescence and 20th Century Poetry (Columbia University Press, 2007), Parallel Play: Poems (Graywolf, 2006), Randall Jarrell on W. H. Auden (editor with Hannah Brooks-Motl, Columbia University Press, 2005), Randall Jarrell and His Age (Columbia University Press, 2002), and Popular Music: Poems (Center for Literary Publishing, 1999).

I am an Associate Professor of English at Harvard University. Prior to joining the faculty at Harvard, I spent several years at Macalester College, first as an Assistant Professor, then as an Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of English. I received my Ph.D. in English from Yale University in 2000, my A.B. from Harvard in 1994.

Reviews

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think Stephen Burt is a really brilliant guy, and I liked a lot of what I found in this book. Quite honestly, there were a few poems that felt like filler to me, but then another poem would come in and make me feel better. I think quite a few people would enjoy this book - it's nice and solid in a non-threatening way. I'm waiting for him to go deeper into the psyche of Kitty Pryde.

[Joanne Gass · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sometimes Burt's poems are too obstruse for me, and I think he tends occasionally plays too much with lines and shapes. But, he also includes two sly sestinas that I very much enjoyed.

[Steven · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Acorns scatter like dice
In the driveways of next week;
heroic ants carry twice their weight on sticks...
Is to be adult to be always
disappointed, or to feign
satisfaction with what is? And these are the stars,
as faint,
lucid and
distant from us as our onetime hopes."

"They do not see the sea
but write on it with their canes.
Each tide delivers their notes;
each moon comes up to read
the deliquescent scrawl above their names."

"The future is nothing more
Than its own revenge on the past;
The horizon lets its smoke up, out of bounds."

[Ross Williamson · Rating 4 out of 5]

dense in a good way. especially enjoyed the pop culture poems (superman, buffy, x-men).