Russell Thorburn Publishes Two New Books in Fall 2009!

Russell Thorburn is having two new books out Fall 2009! He is more prolific than ever. Check out his book with Marick Press "Father Tell Me I Have Not Aged"

Thorburn writes across as broad an imaginative spectrum as any poet working today. The subjects of The Drunken Piano are exquisitely varied—real and fantastic literary biography, childhood rapture, rock and roll, adolescence, old movies, spies, soldiers, love, baseball played by sons and legends, the Russian cold of Upper Michigan. And through all this, the mental life we inhabit has a consistent complexity, depth and (above all) authenticity that makes this book the best of company.
--Jonathan Johnson, associate professor at the Inland Northwest Center for Writers, the graduate writing program at Eastern Washington University; poet, Mastodon 80% Complete and In the Land We Imagined Ourselves

Notes pulled from a Bergmanesque cello, house whiskey, the grainy surface of film noir detective movies—sepia nights and sleepless mornings, you will want Russell Thorburn’s Drunken Piano at your bedside…travel with them in your back pocket, but you won’t rest easy: these poems are too miraculous for that.
--Bronwyn Mills, Professor of Caribbean Literature at Northern Michigan University, author of forthcoming novel, Beastly

In The Drunken Piano Russell Thorburn creates an intense and complicatedly emotional persona by using the fictional consciousness of others. It’s edgy stuff, out there where death, sex, war, and nature intermingle into blisters of erotic awareness. Thorburn creates a set of dynamics that transcends the merely notational narrative of the historical, assimilating his truths into a powerful poetic style. Heavily enjambed, his diction and syntax are brutally harsh in the service of beauty and truth. These are some of the most urgent lyric intertwinings I’ve read in a while—narrative poems of such velocity they blur into music, and, I am tempted to say, pure song. And yet it is a terrible music as well, completely authentic. Read this book for the way it shatters the boundaries of “story” by creating an original and necessary human noise that is the thing we remember when we put the book down. Which is why we return. Russell Thorburn has turned into the kind of poet I want to read and reread over and over again. One of the few.

--David Dodd Lee, author of four books of poems, Downsides of Fish Culture, Wilderness, Arrow Pointing North, and The Nervous Filaments