Poetry. "Should we have stayed at home, wherever that may be?" a traveler writes in a notebook at the end of Elizabeth Bishop's "Questions of Travel." The poems in NEVER NIGHT ask the same question as they travel textual geographies from wheat farm to boreal forest, from a cave become fallout shelter to a spy satellite's view of a wrecked oil tanker, from a gold mine's tailings to a child burying a dead guinea pig. Whether investigating a derailed train, a two-headed moose fetus or a melting glacier, these poems reveal wounded earth giving birth to shimmering form, death held at bay without artifice in the meditations of a child's new words.

"NEVER NIGHT is a hymn to life, a meditation on day and night, on the seasons, on nature and on love. Alaska may be real chilly in the winter but these beautiful poems are more than warm. Apparently poetry can change climate...."—Adam Zagajewski

Author City: Two Rivers, AK USA

Derick Burleson is the author of MELT (Marick Press, 2012), NEVER NIGHT (Marick Press, 2007), and Ejo: Poems, Rwanda 1991-94 (University of Wisconsin Press, 2000). His poems have appeared in The Georgia Review, The Kenyon Review, The Paris Review, The Southern Review and Poetry, among other journals. He directs the MFA program in Creative Writing Program at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and lives in Two Rivers.

Reviews and Other Links
author's painting blog
Derek Sheffield @ Gently Read Literature
Zinta Aistars @ The Smoking Poet
interview @ The Smoking Poet