In a collection of urgent and intimate poems, D. Nurkse explores the biblical past and the terrifying politics of the present with which it resonates, the legacy of fathers and the flawed kingdoms they leave their sons.In “Ben Adan,” a stunning poem in the opening sequence of the collection, we witness the stirring drama between a captor and the prisoner commanded to dig his own grave (“perhaps in a moment / he will lift me up / and hold me trembling, / more scared than I / and more relieved”). “After a Bombing” examines children’s drawings as deep symbolic reactions to 9/11. The subtly majestic “Lament for the Makers of Brooklyn” builds the poignant case for a lost world: “Where is Policastro the locksmith now?” the poet asks. “Half-blind, he wore two pairs of glasses / held together by duct tape, / . . . / afterward the key turned / for you but not for me.”A poet of unique force and sensitivity, Nurkse refuses to pass over the marginal characters and corners of the world, attuned to the scraps of beauty or insight they might offer up in the midst of moral darkness. In The Border Kingdom he has given us an exceptionally powerful collection of poems—unfailingly rich in imagery, undaunted in subject and spirit.JerichoSometimes in a high window a white curtain knotted against itselfgives a glimpse of the loversas they were before the war:with great concentration and silencethey undo a mother-of-pearl snapwhile a cat perched on the silllooks down with burning eyes.

The Border Kingdom

Literature & Fiction

Nurkse, D.

Poetry

KNOPF

D. Nurkse’s deeply satisfying new collection is a haunted love letter to the far corners of his hometown, Brooklyn, New York, and a meditation on the selves that were left behind in those indelible places. Here Nurkse brings alive the particular details that shape a life, in this case unique to the world of Brooklyn—a job at the Arnold Grill, “topping off drafts with a paddle” for the truckers who came in; the deaf white alley cat that mysteriously survived the winter on a stoop in Bensonhurst; the narrow bed where young love took place; the wild gardens behind the tenements. His exploration of this almost mythic city past is combined with a sense of the future speeding toward us—the ongoing riddle of time and being in a larger universe.     . . . And she who was driving said, We know the coming disaster intimately but the present is unknowable.   Which disaster, I wondered, sexual or geological? But I was shy: her beauty was like a language she didn’t speak and had never heard.   From “The Present”

A Night in Brooklyn: Poems

Self-Help

Death & Grief

In this elegant collection, D. Nurkse elegizes a lost father, a foreshortened childhood, and a young marriage. From the drenched lawns of suburbia to the streets of Brooklyn, he delivers up the small but crucial epiphanies that propel an American coming-of-age and chronicles the development of a tender yet exacting consciousness. As the diversions of childhood prefigure the heartbreak of adulthood, Nurkse captures the exquisite sadness of each small “fall” that carries us further from our early innocence. In the book’s final section, the poet turns to face mortality with a series of stirring poems about illness in midlife. Throughout, Nurkse celebrates the sheer strangeness of our perceptions in a language that is both astute and surpassingly lyrical.

The Fall

The Fall: Poems

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

D. Nurkse’s Burnt Island explores tragedy both grand and intimate, in city and country, in our own troubled moment and across the greater scope of geological time. Arranged in three “suites” of lucid, often heart-wrenching verse, the book begins with a city under siege, in a group of poems that becomes a subtle homage to New York after 9/11–a metaphorical “burnt island,” where diggers doze on their shovels, citizens contribute bottles of water, M&M’s, and casseroles to recovery efforts, and survivors, mesmerized by the photos of the missing, compare them “scar by scar with the faces of the living.” Nurkse then takes up the journey of a couple starting again in nature at a specific place called Burnt Island, where the elements instruct them, seeming to mirror their conflicts and strife. Finally, in a charming and profound series of poems centered on marine ecology, he finds the infinite in the infinitesimally small, and offers us, in sparkling, mysterious verses, the strange comfort that comes with observing the life of the ocean.we are like youbecause we are born by the billionsand float into the open ocean–. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .we live another secondor much less, less than a blink,until the code comes to know itselfand the mind dreams another mindthat will survive itthere, in the bright curtain of spray. (from “The Granite Coast”)From the Hardcover edition.

Burnt Island: Poems

Genre Fiction

From the award-winning poet: a powerful collection that explores the biblical past and the terrifying politics of the present, the legacy of fathers and the flawed kingdoms they leave their sons. Now in paperback. In "Ben Adan," a stunning poem in the opening sequence of the collection, we witness the drama between a captor and the prisoner commanded to dig his own grave ("perhaps in a moment / he will lift me up / and hold me trembling, / more scared than I / and more relieved"). "After a Bombing" examines children's drawings as deep symbolic reactions to 9/11. The subtly majestic "Lament for the Makers of Brooklyn" builds the poignant case for a lost world: "Where is Policastro the locksmith now?" the poet asks. "Half-blind, he wore two pairs of glasses / held together by duct tape, / . . . / afterward the key turned / for you but not for me." In exploring the small empires of human conflict, which expand in all directions, Nurkse is attuned to the scraps of beauty or insight that marginal characters and corners of the world might offer up in the midst of moral darkness. With The Border Kingdom, he has given us a collection unfailingly rich in imagery, undaunted in subject and spirit.

The Border Kingdom: Poems

Relationships

D. Nurkse’s deeply satisfying new collection is a haunted love letter to the far corners of his hometown, Brooklyn, New York, and a meditation on the selves that were left behind in those indelible places. Here Nurkse brings alive the particular details that shape a life, in this case unique to the world of Brooklyn—a job at the Arnold Grill, “topping off drafts with a paddle” for the truckers who came in; the deaf white alley cat that mysteriously survived the winter on a stoop in Bensonhurst; the narrow bed where young love took place; the wild gardens behind the tenements. His exploration of this almost mythic city past is combined with a sense of the future speeding toward us—the ongoing riddle of time and being in a larger universe. . . . And she who was driving said, We know the coming disaster intimately but the present is unknowable. Which disaster, I wondered, sexual or geological? But I was shy: her beauty was like a language she didn’t speak and had never heard. From “The Present”

A contemporary requiem--an earthy yet elegant reconsideration of the Tristan and Iseult story, from the former poet laureate of Brooklyn. In D. Nurkse's wood of Morois, the Forest of Love, there's a fine line between the real and the imaginary, the archaic and the actual, poetry and news. The poems feature the voices of the lovers and all parties around them, including the servant Brangien; Tristan's horse, Beau Joueur; even the living spring that flows through the tale ("in my breathing shadow / the lovers hear their voices / confused with mine / promising a slate roof, / a gate, a child . . . "). Nurkse brings us an Iseult who has more power than she wants over Tristan's imagination, and a Tristan who understands his fate early on: "That charm was so strong, no luck could free us." For these lovers, time closes like a book, but it remains open for us as we hear both new tones and familiar voices, eerily like our own, in this age-old story made new again.

Love in the Last Days: After Tristan and Iseult

In an illuminating collection of selected poems over thirty-five years, one of our most essential American poets casts a clear eye on our politics, our places, and our heart’s hidden stories.\nD. Nurkse’s immigrant parents met on a boat out of Europe in 1940; he was a child of the generation whose anxieties were forged in the shadow of Hiroshima and the aftermath of WWII. His poems extend that child’s dignified ignorance into an open encounter with the cataclysms of the latter twentieth century and with family structures.\nWhispers of the old country of Estonia provide the backdrop for the boy’s baseballs, thrown in the fading twilight of the 1950s (“Secretly, I was proudest of my skill / at standing alone in the darkness”). The young man explores sexual passion and the arrival of a child in a young marriage (“We showed her daylight in our cupped hands”), while the mature poet writes of loneliness and community in our cities (“but on the streets / there was no one”), and the urgent need for us to keep expressing our will as citizens.\nThroughout this matchless career, over eleven books, Nurkse has crafted visceral lines that celebrate the fragility of what simply exists—birdsong, moonrise, illness, water towers—and the complexity of human perception, our stumble forward through it toward understanding.

A Country of Strangers: New and Selected Poems

Parenting & Relationships

This is the first collection of poems by D. Nurske, whose work has appeared in such publications as The Massachusetts Review, American Poetry Review, New Letters, Epoch, Confrontation, and Hanging Loose.

Shadow Wars

Hanging Loose Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Nurkse, D.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Nurkse, D.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Nurkse, D.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Border Kingdom

A Night in Brooklyn: Poems

The Fall

The Fall: Poems

Burnt Island: Poems

The Border Kingdom: Poems

A Night in Brooklyn: Poems

Love in the Last Days: After Tristan and Iseult

A Country of Strangers: New and Selected Poems

Shadow Wars