Dennis Nurkse is the author of eleven collections of poetry, including Love In The Last Days: After Tristan And Iseult (2017), A Night In Brooklyn (2012), The Border Kingdom (2008), Burnt Island (2005), and The Fall (2002), from Alfred Knopf. He is the recipient of a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim fellowship in poetry, two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, two New York Foundation for the Arts fellowships, a Whiting Award in Poetry, and prizes from The Poetry Foundation and the Tanne Foundation. He served as poet laureate of Brooklyn from 1996 to 2001. His work has been translated into French, Russian, Italian, Estonian, and other languages, and his poems have been anthologized in six editions of the Best American Poetry series. In 2011, a third edition of Voices Over Water, an earlier collection, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for best book of poetry published in the U.K. Nurkse has also written on human rights and was elected to the board of Amnesty International-USA for a 2007-2010 term. He was a program officer for the Geneva-based NGO Defence for Children International from 1988 to 1992 and worked as a consultant for UNICEF. His study At Special Risk: The Impact of Political Violence On Minors In Haiti was commissioned by Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service. Nurkse has taught poetry at Rikers Island Correctional Facility and in inner-city literacy programs, as well as at MFA programs at Rutgers, Brooklyn College, and Stonecoast. He is currently a long-term member of the writing faculty at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in Brooklyn with his wife, the writer Beth Bosworth, and the wild puppy Zephyr.
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Staggered LightsPoemsFrom"Small Countries"
A man and a woman
are lying together
listening to news of a war.
The radio dial
is the only light in the room.
Casualties are read out.
He thinks, “Those are people
I no longer have to love,”
and he touches her hair
and calls her name
but it sounds strange to her
like a stone left over
from a house already built.
Staggered Lights:Poems -
Staggered LightsPoemsFrom"Ninety"
I baked my grandmother
a cake with ninety candles.
She carried it across the icy road
to show to her girlfriend.
I trotted beside her, hoping
March wind would blow the flames out
and prove her age an illusion.
But she held the dish so steady
the tiny pillars of fire
supported nothing.
Her friend was ninety-five
and suggested: let the candles gutter
until the cake is covered with wax.
When the smells of fire and sweetness
were married, the black wine
was uncorked, and two cigars
shone in absolute darkness.
Staggered Lights:Poems -
Staggered LightsPoemsFrom"The Old Religion"
Every night the tambourines
of the storefront church
downstairs, the guitar
resolving and resolving, the saved
chanting thanks
every night: and us
sometimes in love, sometimes
hating each other, sometimes
not even keeping track, just lying
watching the clouds
in the skylight, and listening
for something the drum’s
always about to explain.
Staggered Lights:Poems
“These are not easy poems, but they don’t play tricks on the reader, either. Stay with one, and it will unfold into a meditation on birth, death, longing or loneliness. And even a casual tour through this short collection returns delights . . . ” —The New York Times [on A Night in Brooklyn]
"D. Nurkse's work is marked by a certain sober clarity that I have long admired. In Burnt Island, his eighth collection, he has devised three suites that stretch the reader's imagination well beyond the unspoken, conventional limits of the territory poetry is allowed to address . . . it's a joy to see subjects that are rarely approached by poets described so accurately in such clear poetic language.” —Field
“D. Nurkse’s The Fall features three highly personal sequences of poems concerning death, love, and illness. Their drama and the universality of their themes draw us in . . . The Fall—mystical, mesmerizing, elegant—is a cat’s eye of a collection.” —Bill Christophersen, Poetry
Selected Works
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