"Elizabeth Burk’s new poetry collection, Unmoored is both existentially serious and massively entertaining.” It is arranged loosely in the form of a memoir—as a New Yorker who married a Cajun, Burk lives part-time in southwest Louisiana and has published two chapbooks describing this experience, Learning to Love Louisiana and Louisiana Purchase. This new collection includes many poems from these chapbooks as well as new poems that focus on aging—on getting through the last stretch of life with grace and humor. Burk has compiled her work into a poetic memoir of a life well-lived and well-examined for all of its eccentricities and triumphs. Undoubtedly, Unmoored can be counted among the latter.

“As often as I’ve heard the term ‘whirlwing’ used to describe a book, you’d think I’d have been caught up in more than a few of those gusts over the years. Truth is, though I can’t remember the last time I’ve been as swept away by a book of poetry as I was by Elizabeth Burks new collection, Unmoored. These poems whisk us from the Northeast to Europe and back to Louisiana, and they transport us from childhood to gray hair in a breath. Burk’s lines are as sharp as any nun’s reproaching glance, as rich as any home cooked meal, and as fluid as fingers hovering over a piano keyboard practicing Chopen. Line by line, Burk puts the knife in our hands to chop onions, she opens a favorite book to its best page and lets us read Marx with her father’s eyes, and poem after poem her words pop like a rifle’s retort. With writing this exquisite, it’s impossible not to be drawn into these poems’ memories and blown away.”

“In a time when the stories we look to define us, to blast our paths forward with light, are stolen, rearranged and revised without our permission, we desperately need what Liz Burk offers—an indomitable city girl’s wily romp through yesterday’s good and not so good, the savvy musings of a woman charmed and confounded by the widening world, and a lyrical take on what stays right and what goes wrong as we age. Unmoored, by the way, is no such thing—this unforgettable work is rooted in love, loss, heartbreak, wonder and revelation.”

“Elizabeth Burk’s Unmoored invites us to ask of ourselves and of one another–how did we get so close? / how did we dare? With sumptuous, precise images and language, these poems ask questions that do not insist on definitive answers, likening the human experience of love, memory and aging to an accident in slow motion. From the searing rooftops of youth to the crisp country house of one’s later years, from dripping tomatoes to turtles climbing toward the peak, and from young, boundless love to sustained love which grounds us, in Unmooredwe find ourselves asking is there time, is there time?”

“Over the course of an emotionally adventurous life, our heroine moves through landscapes urban, suburban, and wild, but the real journey is a journey of the heart. Unmooredreminds us that careful attention to autobiography must include politics, philosophy, biology, spirituality. In one of the book’s poised lyrics, Snow White looks in the mirror and asks ‘Is that a strand of gray you see? / What does the mirror say, if not that you are not what you seem to be, not what /you think?’ Another poem replies: ‘Is there time, is there time?’ Elizabeth Burk is fearless and witty enough to turn those questions on herself and demonstrate that after realization comes wisdom, joy, love.”

“In her delicious poetry collection, Unmoored, Liz Burk invites us to join her as she revisits the European coming of age period of her life, explores the world of the enigmatic Louisiana bayou country, and finally awakens to the self-realizing wonder and liberation of impermanence.

And it was all for the fun of it!

....with the waning stretch of life you have left,
where you find yourself awakened.
....but your mind remains a spinning top, shining
into dark corners, squinting in bright light’
What will you do?”

“Elizabeth Burk’s voice rings clear and genuine as she explores the heart and body’s deepest rooms. I admire the courage and lyricism the poems in Unmoored exhibit while probing the longing and ambivalence of both place and age.”