In Leave Me a Little Want, Beverly Burch winds us through the past, the Ars poetica of life, and the natural world with so much hunger on the edge of bloom. These lush poems remind us of living a starstruck life—where splendor and grief bloom together as well as separately and everything yearning for its own fist of red petals. Leave Me a Little Want is rich with imagery, sonnets, broken sonnets, and a distinct voice questioning throughout: How do things just disappear? How will I face dying? Does the earth still want us? You will only discover the answers if you listen to these poems that whisper and sing to you—Shake things up…Go somewhere. It’s all in here for you—confetti sunsets, sweet tranquility, lemony light, three goldfinch in the lavender—beauty is everywhere in these poems with Burch making sure we have everything we need, and yes, Reader, she is that good, she will never leave you wanting.

—Kelli Russell Agodon, Dialogues with Rising Tides

Beverly Burch’s beautiful book is full of deeply sensory and shape-shifting sonnets. Each line is full of the world’s heft, its hustled minutes, and its urgent joys. In imperatives and questions, riddles and rumors, and unholy green born again in mud, Burch shakes us awake with each line. Every day and every heartbeat is full of beauty and meaning here, and we are lucky enough to see the seasons through Burch’s thoughtful and rapturous attention.

—Traci Brimhall, Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod

In “The Latter Days of Eve,” Beverly Burch writes into the Eve myth as if Eve were a prism shining a multitude of reflections across the ages. Oh Eve, every Eve, she laments as we meet a cast of women in therapy offices, trashed campgrounds, old shrines, along the interstate, and we meet ourselves running from our own disastrous lots. In Burch’s dystopia, language is powerful and wholly original—wicked little stars, butcherbirds, junkyard dogs, ferocious hair, an inverted ribcage—exposing the narrative of escape and the refusal to disappear as the world warps fast. Written at the edge of blossoming disaster and uncertain survival, the ancient and contemporary moment are exquisitely braided, and through this seer’s eye, this most skillful poet’s hand, she helps us remember how always, the world’s egg breaks open. A stunning work.

—Jennifer K. Sweeney, author of “Little Spells”

“In Latter Days of Eve, Beverly Burch’s re-imagined Eden is original and deliciously anachronistic; Adam and Eve’s 'marriage is snake-bit’ and there is ‘something/ mechanical droning in a faraway sky.’ Burch deftly leads us through biblical narratives to contemporary motherhood, to ‘the desolate flourescence of mini-malls.’ This fine book is a feat of the imagination.”    

—Maggie Smith, author of Good Bones

Women’s Voices For Change

"I love 'Lamentation for the Children' for its lyricism alone—its  stunning diction and imagery: the children “with the soft tentacles of  their openness” who return to us “like pagans” drawn to “mid-winter  light” with their “hearts blown apart or triumph in their throats.”"

New Pages

“[How a Mirage Works] is full of moments where attentive writing brings an emotional acuity to the page. Words are not wasted in How a Mirage Works. Though  novels rather than poetry are thought of as the page-turners of the  literary world, as I read these poems, I just wanted to keep going,  slowly flipping the page to see what would come next.”