Open Burning

Christopher McCurry

Accents Publishing is proud to bring to you Christopher McCurry's first full-length poetry collection. Reality and dreams mesh in Open Burning, detailing the fallout of a young couple's divorce. At times elliptical and surreal, the emotional and psychological landscape of these poems is punctuated by flashes of the real risks and rewards of navigating difficult times with grace and compassion. Through the magic of these well-crafted poems, we become invested in the seemingly inconsequential as well as the life-changing.

What Others Say About Open Burning

The poems in this rich collection are both spare and candid, chronicling the demise of a marriage, even as it nearly coincides with a father's blooming love for his young daughter. One love is lost, but a wholly different love arrives. At times the contrast is inexplicable and the speaking voice in these poems doesn't quite know to whom the poems should be addressed—the ex-wife, the young daughter, himself, the ether. That is a perspective I find so arresting in this book, a crossroads of grief that has no bottom and love that has no end, weighted with the plain responsibility of somehow going forward.

—Maurice Manning

"Once there was a boy," Christopher McCurry writes in Open Burning, "and now there is still a boy but also the idea of a man." Once there was a marriage between that man and a woman and a daughter who was born of that marriage that no longer is, and McCurry writes about that, too, that most of all in poems that are at once frank and vulnerable. It's hard work, peeling away the tough layers to get to the raw seed of the heart, and McCurry goes there again and again in this book, taking risks that most male writers won't. Ultimately he understands men and their power to wound and fail, and he takes that sorrowful knowledge and uses it to instruct the daughter he loves so fiercely: "And why / when you are afraid of me / I think good / wish me dead— / what's more useful / to a little girl / than knowing / men are dangerous.

—Sarah Freligh

Open Burning

An apocalypse should be sudden
and personal like the snare

in the cord of your spine
at last yanked

and accounted for.
By now at least one theory

has to be right. I'll see you,
love, disintegrated.

So the question is not
how will the world end,

but what will we do
until it's our turn

to toss our bodies
in the burn barrel.

Details and Ordering

Hardcover

Publication Date: February 15, 2020
Format: Hardcover, 6" x 9"
ISBN: 978-1-936628-55-1
Price: $24.00

Paperback

Publication Date: October 20, 2020
Format: Softcover, 6" x 9"
ISBN: 978-1-936628-61-2
Price: $16.00

About the Author

Christopher McCurry grew up right outside of Lexington, Kentucky in the small town of Paris. In the seventh grade he entered one of his poems in a contest and won a medal. He's since lost the medal but still remembers the poem. His poetry has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and featured on NPR's On Point as a Best Book of 2016 for his chapbook of marriage sonnets Nearly Perfect Photograph. A graduate of the Bread Loaf School of English at Middlebury College and a high school English teacher, he spends his time playing board games, skateboarding, and going on adventures with his daughter Abra. In 2015, Christopher co-founded Workhorse, a publishing company and community for working writers. He believes everyone should write poems and that everyone can. You can find him online at christophermccurry.com or workhorsewriters.com.