Gradually the World: New and Selected Poems, 1982 – 2013 by Burt Kimmelman

The specificity of Burt Kimmelman's poems has, for more than thirty years, been a singularly locating force. It situates us in space, in relation to the luminosity of objects, art, and one another. That every shadow of wonder can stand forth in the most familiar words is the gift this poet offers his readers time and again.

– Susan Howe

Praise for Burt Kimmelman's Earlier Poetry

“A rare evocation . . . the wonder of this world in itself.”
– Robert Creeley

“Artful, fastidious, learned . . . I am delighted by so much feeling for style.”
– Alfred Kazin

“A strict & powerful accounting, leaving me – for one – filled with admiration & hooked on every word.”
– Jerome Rothenberg

“Form calls deeply to form, as though the works … lifted one to the very brim of language….”
– Michael Heller

“Few contemporary poets so gracefully demonstrate classic notions of what the practice of poetry must be.”
– Madeline Tiger, Jacket

“Exceptionally intelligent and necessary . . ."
-– Ed Foster, Poetry Project Newsletter

“His confidence lies with the poem itself, that he has found it (or that it has found him)….”
– Norman Finkelstein, The Offending Adam

“[In Kimmelman's poems] the arts restate the questions we have been asking and the ways they clean and stretch our questions reward us more than answers would.”
– William Bronk

“As quiet an experience as anyone could wish for.”
– Cid Corman

“He finds what is luminously transcendent….”
– Harvey Shapiro

“Worth our own best attention. ”
– John Taggart

“Attains ‘the simple … facts’.”
– Samuel Menashe

“A verse so delicate and so far from insistence….”
– Karl Young, Light & Dust

“Kimmelman's quiet poems contain the luminescence of perception, its lure, its beauty, its Zen of breath, tracing beauty in the pulse of the extant."
-Star Black

“Kimmelman's poems attest to the simple majesties of being, the massive implications of the everyday."
– Eric Hoffman, Rain Taxi

Burt Kimmelman has published seven previous collections of poetry: The Way We Live (2011), As If Free ( 2009), There Are Words (2007), Somehow (2005), The Pond at Cape May Point (2002), a collaboration with the painter Fred Caruso, First Life (2000), and Musaics (1992). He has also published a number of book-length literary studies as well as scores of critical articles on medieval, modern, and contemporary poetry. In the 1980s and 1990s he was the senior editor of the now defunct Poetry New York: A Journal of Poetry and Translation.

Kimmelman was born and raised in New York City and now lives in a nearby suburb with his wife the writer Diane Simmons. He teaches literary and cultural studies at New Jersey Institute of Technology.

Recent interviews of Kimmelman are available online: with Tom Fink in Jacket2 (text) and with George Spencer at Poetry Thin Air (video). Additional information and internet links can be found at BurtKimmelman.com.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 252 pages

· Binding: Perfect-Bound

· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]

· ISBN: 978-1-60964-134-4

Artwork by Basil King