Red Wing poet and translator Christopher Burawa will be reading from his new chapbook, Where I Came Here From, published by Finishing Line Press, at the Red Wing Arts Depot on Thursday, June 1, at 6:30PM. There will be light refreshments and books for sale after the event.
Burawa has invited two distinguished poets, Molly Keifer and Melissa Cundieff, to read at the book launch. Molly Sutton Keifer is a Red Wing high school teacher, poet, and is the publisher of Tinder Box Press. Melissa Cundieff is an award-winning poet who lives in St. Paul and teaches creative writing in the graduate program at Macalester College.
Where I Came Here From is a collection of Zen Buddhist inspired poems that occasionally wander a path to the north—to Iceland, Christopher Burawa’s birthplace. The Iceland poems reflect, as Cynthia Hogue suggests, an “Icelandic Zen,” of the Self examining itself, unearthing what remains of his connections to the past and the trauma of separation, of being caught in the illusion of the fixated, isolated self. In these poems he follows the schematics of the skandhas and dependent origination, tracing the activity of mind and witnessing the reborn self that arises from its dwelling.
Poet and editor Blas Falconer, who teaches in the MFA program at San Diego State University says of Burawa’s book: “Very few books of poetry move me the way Christopher Burawa’s Where I Came Here From has with its celebration of the imagination. The poems are like trapdoors, giving way to a world where you are both lost and found. Here, you find your way—through wit and earnestness, the playful and the profound—until “the cosmos breaks / open to let you through.”
Poet and Cave Canem elder Afaa Michael Weaver states that: “With deepest humility, a profound commitment to love, and reverence for truth, a book like Where I Came From appears. This does not happen frequently, this peeking into the ordinary with a view to what is there, not really there, but there in the sense of where we live. Burawa takes us beyond the illusion of thought and the firm conviction that some things hurt beyond what we think we can bear, and other things give us immeasurable joy, or hopefulness. We all should know what it takes to write a book of poems like this one. This is Zen.”
Molly Sutton Kiefer is the author of the full-length lyric essay Nestuary (2013), as well as three poetry chapbooks. She has been published in Orion, the Rumpus, Hayden's Ferry Review, Passages North, and DIAGRAM, among others. She runs the nonprofit press Tinderbox Editions and is founding editor of Tinderbox Poetry Journal.
Melissa Cundieff is a poet and visual artist who teaches at both Macalester and University of Minnesota. She received her MFA in creative writing from Vanderbilt University and is the author of the poetry collection Darling Nova, which was selected by Alberto Ríos for the 2018 Autumn House Press Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared twice in The Atlantic, as well as places like Best of the Net, Ninth Letter, and The Adroit Journal. Originally from Texas, she lives in Saint Paul.