Advice from the Lights: Poems

Advice from the Lights is part nostalgia, part confusion, and part an ongoing wondering: How do any of us achieve adulthood? And why would we want to, if we had the choice?

This collection weaves together extraordinary sequences, including Stephanie poems about the poet's imagined girlhood; poems on particular years of the poet's early life, each with its own memories, desires, insecurities, and soundtrack; and versions of poems by the Greek poet Callimachus, whose present-day incarnation worries (who doesn't) about mortality, the favor of the gods, and the reputations of Erik Satie and Taylor Swift. Other poems address the dilemmas of politics, the sense of place, and the paradoxes of parenthood. Here is Burt's most accomplished collection, an essential work that asks who we are, how we become ourselves, and why we make art.