Burial Fragments - Keith Ekiss

Original poems by Keith Ekiss. San Francisco, the millennial city: Mission and Market, bars and cafes, hills, bridges, and ocean. To read the pages of Keith Ekiss's Burial Fragments is to follow a gorgeous thread of urban encounters until you reach the center of the anxious, frenetic, marvelous, and random maze that is life and fatherhood at the edge of America and the 21st century.

Ekiss's subtle prose-poem portraits read like novels in miniature, while his meditations on panic attacks and raising an only child unfold with such distilled precision, you feel their power like current through a wire. As with the city it honors and elegizes, this memorable collection reveals evocative surprises everywhere you look. -Maria Hummel, author of Still Lives In Burial Fragments, Keith Ekiss has absorbed and articulated the dramatic and emotional attention of Charles Baudelaire's flâneur.

In fleeting encounters, his poems of the streets highlight the lives of others whom he passes, absorbing keenly the small human episodes of many kinds that fill day and night on streets and sidewalks, in shops and bars. He sketches a reciprocity of fleeting encounters, and also achieves an intimacy of being with family and friends. Reading his richly populated book, I lost count of the many persons whom he has portrayed, and the humanness of all.

-Reginald Gibbons, author of How Poems Think Burial Fragments is part song for the end-times, part song for San Francisco, its longtime troubling glamor and glamorous trouble. With perfect lucidity, the poems draw us into the speaker's daily anxieties-will the plane go down? will the earthquake come?- while expertly situating these anxieties within their rightful contexts-late-stage capitalism, climate crisis, the ever-present ghosts of the great fires and the AIDS pandemic.

Then, in the midst of so many possible endings, there is a beginning: a child arrives. The speaker becomes a father who must negotiate his growing sense of threat even as he reads to his son: I censor. I form a human shield./ I leave whole cities unburned.

What seems at first to be a collection about psychic displacement becomes, in the end, a collection about psychic placement-about the ways we finally ground ourselves in the places and people we love. If you want to read a book that sugarcoats nothing, that insists on seeing things as they are and revealing who we are, read Burial Fragments. Keith Ekiss is a poet to turn to right now: these poems are so clear-