This is Burk’s second chapbook from this press, and the second that deals with, as the title of the first puts it, Learning to Love Louisiana. The chapbook is infused with food, music, and landscape, three things Louisianans cherish about their home and culture.

Burk splits her time between the states of New York and Louisiana, and in reading the poems here, one gets an idea of how hard it is to leave each place when you have something that makes them both feel like home. The main narrative of the chapbook surrounds Burk and her husband purchasing a house, and as much as this book is about place, it is also about the compromises and complications of relationships and marriage. Burk’s identity as a Northerner is something she is aware of, having married a Southerner, and poems like “Drinking Margaritas and Talking about the Oil Spill” help her navigate the difficult waters of privilege that identifying as such brings, such as being aware of facts like this

Being a Northerner also means knowing more variety in one’s seasons and in “Below Freezing in Vermillion Parish,” Burk paints the scene of a colder-than-usual Louisiana winter, the women wearing fur coats “that live in the back freezer / of the town tailor,” the new cold as something they know exists but are not always prepared for because of its scarcity.